The XmlWriter and XmlTextWriter classes are defined in the System.XML namespace.

The XmlTextWriter class is derived from XmlWriter class, which represents a writer that provides fast non-cached forward-only way of generating XML documents based on the W3C Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 specification.

In this article, I will show you how to use XmlTextWriter class to create an XML document and write data to the document.

Adding namespace Reference

Since Xml classes are defined in the System.XML namespace, so first thing you need to do is to Add the System.XML reference to the project.

using System.Xml;

Creating an XML Document

The constructor of the XmlTextWriter class creates an XML file if file doesn't exist. In this sample, I create a new XML file called xmltest.xml in C\temp directory.

XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter("C:\\temp\\xmltest.xml", null);

NOTE: If you don't want to write data in an XML file and want to display XML contents on the Console, pass Console.Out as a parameter of the constructor.

XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(Console.Out);

Adding Data to the Document

The WriteStartDocument method starts a new document. The WriteStartElement and the WriteEndElement pair is used to add a new element to the document. The WriteString writes a string to the document.

writer.WriteStartDocument();
writer.WriteComment("Commentss: XmlWriter Test Program");
writer.WriteProcessingInstruction("Instruction","Person Record");
writer.WriteStartElement("p", "person", "urn:person");
writer.WriteStartElement("LastName","");
writer.WriteString("Chand");
writer.WriteEndElement();
writer.WriteElementInt16("age","", 25);
writer.WriteEndDocument();

Souce Code: Attachment createxml1.cs 2 KB

namespace WriteToXML
{
using System;
using System.Xml;
/// <summary>
/// Summary description for Class1.
/// </summary>
public class Class1
{
public Class1()
{
}
public static int Main(string[] args)
{
try
{
// Creates an XML file is not exist
XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter("C:\\temp\\xmltest.xml", null);
// Starts a new document
writer.WriteStartDocument();
//Write comments
writer.WriteComment("Commentss: XmlWriter Test Program");
writer.WriteProcessingInstruction("Instruction","Person Record");
// Add elements to the file
writer.WriteStartElement("p", "person", "urn:person");
writer.WriteStartElement("LastName","");
writer.WriteString("Chand");
writer.WriteEndElement();
writer.WriteStartElement("FirstName","");
writer.WriteString("Mahesh");
writer.WriteEndElement();
writer.WriteElementInt16("age","", 25);
// Ends the document
writer.WriteEndDocument();
}
catch (Exception e)
{
Console.WriteLine ("Exception: {0}", e.ToString());
}
return 0;
}
}
}