Select Top XML Nodes using XPath [C#]

This example shows how to select Top N nodes of the specific name from an XML document. To select nodes from XML use method XmlNode.SelectNodes. Pass XPath expression as a parameter and the method returns a list of selected nodes. Suppose we have this XML file.

[XML]

<Names>
    <Name>James</Name>
    <Name>John</Name>
    <Name>Robert</Name>
    <Name>Michael</Name>
    <Name>William</Name>
    <Name>David</Name>
    <Name>Richard</Name>
</Names>

To get all <Name> nodes use XPath expression /Names/Name. If you don't want to selected all nodes, but only top 5 nodes, you can uses XPath expression like this /Names/Name[position() <= 5]. See the example below.

[C#]

XmlDocument xml = new XmlDocument();
xml.LoadXml(str);  // suppose that str string contains "<Names>...</Names>"

XmlNodeList xnList = xml.SelectNodes("/Names/Name[position() <= 5]");
foreach (XmlNode xn in xnList)
{
  Console.WriteLine(xn.InnerText);
}

The output is:

James
John
Robert
Michael
William

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Select Top XML Nodes using XPath [C#]

See also