Using Xpath With Default Namespace in C#

Question

I\'ve got an XML document with a default namespace. I\'m using a XPathNavigator to select a set of nodes using Xpath as follows:

XmlElement myXML = ...;           


        

Answer 1

I used the hacky-but-useful approach described by SpikeDog above. It worked very well until I threw an xpath expression at it that used pipes to combine multiple paths.

So I rewrote it using regular expressions, and thought I'd share:

public string HackXPath(string xpath_, string prefix_)
{
    return System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(xpath_, @"(^(?![A-Za-z0-9\-\.]+::)|[A-Za-z0-9\-\.]+::|[@|/|\[])(?'Expression'[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9\-\.]*)", x =>
                {
                    int expressionIndex = x.Groups["Expression"].Index - x.Index;
                    string before = x.Value.Substring(0, expressionIndex);
                    string after = x.Value.Substring(expressionIndex, x.Value.Length - expressionIndex);
                    return String.Format("{0}{1}:{2}", before, prefix_, after);
                });
}