Formatting an XML string in Silverlight

Silverlight doesn't have the XmlDocument class. You'd otherwise be able to do it as Ian Randell does here. Instead, Silverlight currently offers the XDocument and XmlWriter classes. So you'd do it with these two classes as shown below. Just call the XmlFormat method below and display the result, i.e., with indenting and line breaks, in your UI control.

using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using System.Text;

private string FormatXml(string stringXml)
{
  StringReader stringReader = new StringReader(stringXml);
  //XDocument represents an XML Document, allowing in memory
  // processing of it (primarily via Linq).
  XDocument xDoc = XDocument.Load(stringReader); 
  var stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
  XmlWriter xmlWriter = null;
  try
  {
    var settings = new XmlWriterSettings();
    settings.Indent = true;
    settings.ConformanceLevel = ConformanceLevel.Auto;
    settings.IndentChars = " ";
    settings.OmitXmlDeclaration = true;
    //The XDocument can write to an XmlWriter. 
    //The writer formats the well-formed xml.
    //If not well-formed no formating will occur.
    xmlWriter = XmlWriter.Create(stringBuilder, settings);
    xDoc.WriteTo(xmlWriter);
  }
  finally
  {
    if (xmlWriter != null)
    xmlWriter.Close();
  }
  return stringBuilder.ToString();
} 

License This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)