Expressing recursion in LINQ

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Linq-toXml handles this fine, there is an XElement.Elements()/.Nodes() operation to get immediate children, and a XElement.Descendents()/DescendentNodes() operations to get all descendents. Would you consider that as an example?

To summarize Linq-to-Xml’s behavior… The navigation functions each correspond to an axis type in XPath (http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/xpath_axes.asp). If the navigation function selects Elements, the axis name is used. If the navigation function selects Nodes, the axis name is used with Node appended.

For instance, there are functions Descendants() and DescendantsNode() correspond to XPath’s descendants axis, returning either an XElement or an XNode.

The exception case is not surprisingly the most used case, the children axis. In XPath, this is the axis used if no axis is specified. For this, the linq-to-xml navigation functions are not Children() and ChildrenNodes() but rather Elements() and Nodes().

XElement is a subtype of XNode. XNode’s include things like HTML tags, but also HTML comments, cdata or text. XElements are a type of XNode, but refer specifically to HTML tags. XElements therefore have a tag name, and support the navigation functions.

Now its not as easy to chain navigations in Linq-to-XML as it is XPath. The problem is that navigation functions return collection objects, while the navigation functions are applied to non-collections. Consider the XPath expression which selects a table tag as an immediate child then any descendant table data tag. I think this would look like “./children::table/descendants::td” or “./table/descendants::td”

Using IEnumerable<>::SelectMany() allows one to call the navigation functions on a collection. The equivalent to the above looks something like .Elements(“table”).SelectMany(T => T.Descendants(“td”))

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