How to open and read an XML file in VB.NET

XML is a self describing language and it gives the data as well as the rules to extract what the data it contains. Reading an XML file means that we are reading the information embedded in XML tags in an XML file.

In the previous program we create an XML file and named it as products.xml. The following program read that file and extract the contents inside the XML tag. We can read an XML file in several ways depends on our requirement. This program read the content in Node wise . Here we are using XmlDataDocument class to read the XML file . In this program it search the Node < Product > and its child Nodes and extract the data in child nodes.

Imports System.Xml
Imports System.IO
Public Class Form1
    Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
        Dim xmldoc As New XmlDataDocument()
        Dim xmlnode As XmlNodeList
        Dim i As Integer
        Dim str As String
        Dim fs As New FileStream("products.xml", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read)
        xmldoc.Load(fs)
        xmlnode = xmldoc.GetElementsByTagName("Product")
        For i = 0 To xmlnode.Count - 1
            xmlnode(i).ChildNodes.Item(0).InnerText.Trim()
            str = xmlnode(i).ChildNodes.Item(0).InnerText.Trim() & " | " & xmlnode(i).ChildNodes.Item(1).InnerText.Trim() & " | " & xmlnode(i).ChildNodes.Item(2).InnerText.Trim()
            MsgBox(str)
        Next
    End Sub
End Class