Loading and parsing external XML

It is useful to be able to parse (process the content of) text files and strings containing data in the XML format. C# offers a range of classes and methods to make such processing straightforward, which we'll explore in this recipe.

Getting ready

You'll find player name and score data in XML format in the playerScoreData.xml file in the 11_04 folder. The content of this file is as follows:

<scoreRecordList>
        <scoreRecord>
            <player>matt</player>
            <score>2200</score>
            <date>
                <day>1</day>
                <month>Sep</month>
                <year>2012</year>
 ...