An XML Sitemap is a specially structured XML file which provides important structural information of a website to search engine crawlers for indexing purposes. The basic sitemap structure looks like this.
<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xsi:schemalocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"> <url> <loc>https://lonewolfonline.net/</loc> <priority>1.0</priority> <lastmod>2010-09-14</lastmod> <changefreq>daily</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>https://lonewolfonline.net/simple-xml-parser/</loc> <priority>0.5</priority> <lastmod>2009-09-14</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> </url> </urlset>
Individual <url> tags are wrapped inside the containing <urlset> nodes. Each <url> represents a page on the site. Inside the <url> node, are four nodes.
The <loc> node represents the page url.
The <priority> node represents the webmaster defined site map priority.
The <lastmod> node represents the date which the page was last modified..
The <changefreq> node indicates how often the page is updated and makes a suggestion to the search engine how often to crawl it again.
Writing a Simple XML Parser in C#
For this example I am creating a small console application and outputting the resutls to the screen. I am also reading the sitemap from a file, but you can just as easily download files from a website instead.
You can also download a sample project from Github.
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Xml;
namespace SitemapXMLParser
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
XmlDocument urldoc = new XmlDocument();
urldoc.Load("Sitemap.xml");
XmlNodeList xnList = urldoc.GetElementsByTagName("url");
foreach (XmlNode node in xnList)
{
Console.WriteLine("url " + node["loc"].InnerText);
Console.WriteLine("priority " + node["priority"].InnerText);
Console.WriteLine("last modified " + node["lastmod"].InnerText);
Console.WriteLine("change frequency " + node["changefreq"].InnerText);
Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine);
}
}
}
}
