How to get specific element Count in XML or XElement variable

Question

Consider this XML:

<Employees>
    <Person>
        <ID>1000</ID>
        <Name>Nima</Name>
        <LName>Agha</LName>
    </Person>
    <Person>
        <ID>1001</ID>
        <Name>Ligha</Name>
        <LName>Ligha</LName>
    </Person>
    <Person>
        <ID>1002</ID>
        <Name>Jigha</Name>
        <LName>Jigha</LName>
    </Person>
    <Person>
        <ID>1003</ID>
        <Name>Aba</Name>
        <LName>Aba</LName>
    </Person>
</Employees>

I declare a XElement variable and create the XML assigning it to that. How I can get count of ID elements in this XML variable in C#?

Solution 1

Prerequisite: in order to use .Count() you need to import the namespace System.Linq:

using System.Linq;

You can filter the descendant elements using the Descendants method with the name "ID", then count the results:

int count = xml.Descendants("ID").Count();

Be aware that Descendants looks through all levels. If you had an element other than Person that also had an ID child element, you would want to be more specific. In that case, to count ID child elements that belong to Person elements, you would use:

int count = xml.Elements("Person")
               .Elements("ID")
               .Count();

Solution 2

XmlDocument xmldoc = new XmlDocument();
 xmldoc.Load(XmlPath);
var totalItems = xmldoc.SelectNodes(
         "/root/node/LastName/").Count;

Comments

[Arian]

If you don't use Elemets("Employees") it returns 0 :-?

[Ahmad Mageed]

@Nima based on your sample input Employees is the root node, and if you're using an XElement there's no need for Elements("Employee") to be part of the query. If it isn't the root element, then you can either include it, or use xml.Descendants("Person").Elements("ID").Count() instead, thereby avoiding the need to walk the XML element by element.

[Jon Heggland]

Is this answer still current? As far as I can tell, Descendants()and Elements() both return an IEnumerable, which doesn't seem to have a Count()method. Am I missing something obvious?