Parsing XML by position using XDocument

Question

I have some XML from a third party that looks something like this:

<Breakfasts>
    <Name>Cornflakes</Name>
    <Description>Just add milk</Name>
    <Name>Toast</Name>
    <Name>Muesli</Name>
    <Description>Healthy option</Description>
</Breakfasts>

We have to infer the relationship between Name and Description by the position of the nodes in the XML. So Cornflakes is "Just add milk", Toast does not have a description, Muesli is "Healthy option" and so on.

I have a class called Breakfast which looks like this:

public class Breakfast
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Description { get; set; }
}

How can this XML be parsed (using XDocument, perhaps?) into a List of Breakfast?

Answer 1

Ick - what a horrible format. I'd probably do something like:

var list = doc.Descendants("Name").Select(MakeBreakfast).ToList();
...

static Breakfast MakeBreakfast(XElement nameElement)
{
    string name = (string) nameElement;
    var nextElement = nameElement.ElementsAfterSelf().FirstOrDefault();
    string description = 
        nextElement != null && nextElement.Name.LocalName == "Description"
        ? (string) nextElement
        : null;
    return new Breakfast { Name = name, Description = description };
}

Answer 2

This is what I'd do:

var breakfasts =
    doc.Root.Elements("Name").Select(x => new Breakfast()
    {
        Name = x.Value,
        Description = 
            x.NextNode as XElement != null 
            ? (x.NextNode as XElement).Name == "Description"
                ? (x.NextNode as XElement).Value 
                : ""
            : "",
    }).ToList();

This gives me: