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Is there an easy way to detect the existence of an empty attribute on an XPathNavigator XML node (e.g. <node> vs. <node attribute="">)? Node.GetAttribute returns an empty string either way. The only thing I can think of is checking the Node.OuterXML property, which seems like a really dumb approach.

(Note: the node won't actually be empty, so I can't just use Node.HasAttributes.)

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  • If possible, I would recommend using LINQ to XML. Commented Jun 14, 2011 at 22:59
  • That might be doable, but in testing LINQ in the early stages of this project, I found it added a lot of overhead compared to just parsing the XML directly. It's definitely useful in some situations, though, so I may look into it some more. Commented Jun 15, 2011 at 0:14
  • I don't understand, using LINQ to XML, is “just parsing the XML directly” too, it's just different API (and IMHO better one). I don't know why would it create a performance overhead. If you were comparing it with something like XmlReader, that would be different, but you aren't. Commented Jun 16, 2011 at 22:09
  • @svick: I'd have to go back and re-try...I did preliminary evaluations on the various XML parsing options when I was starting and picked the one that seemed the fastest and that fit my needs, but I can't claim to be significantly familiar with any of them, as this is my first foray into .NET territory, so perhaps I was doing something less-than-optimal or thought there was some feature missing that was actually there. At this point, I couldn't tell you. (And yeah, my wording was a little inaccurate there, as using any parsing API is inherently not parsing the XML directly.) Commented Jun 17, 2011 at 5:32

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You can use XPath:

elem.SelectSingleNode("@attribute")

This returns null, if the the attributte attribute doesn't exist, and another XPathNavigator with NodeType of Attribute and Value containing an empty string if the attribute exists, but is empty.

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