Empty elements

[carrigart]

Hey, So I have a simple person class as follows

public class Person
{

    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Sex { get; set; }
    public int Age { get; set; }
}

and my xml looks like this

Colin
34
Male

Joe
23
Male

Mary
Female

As you can see, one of the elements is empty and I'm trying to account for this in my query. I have tried

var results = (from p in xdoc.Descendants("Person")
select new Person
{
Name = p.Element("Name").Value,
Sex = p.Element("Sex").Value,
Age = int.Parse(p.Element("Age").Value ?? "0")
}).ToList();

but I get a FormatException with the message "Input string was not in a correct format". Anyone got any ideas of how I can deal with this. I know that if my Age property was a string, then I can get it working but I want to keep it an int. Any help would be great Thanks

[J4amieC]

Age = int.Parse( String.IsNullOrEmpty(p.Element("Age").Value) ? "0" : p.Element("Age").Value)

[L Viljoen]

the ?? statement means that is the value is null it should be changed to 0, a empty string is still a value if you wish to make a nullable property use ? after the type declaration Eg public string? Name { get; set; } public string? Sex { get; set; } public int? Age { get; set; } This will mean that when you referencing the property you have two sub properties of relevance HasValue and Value

Chona1171 Web Developer (C#), Silverlight

[Sanjay J Patolia]

Yes correct. This should work without any format exception. :) Thanks