How to remove all comment tags from XmlDocument

In this post I will share C# code to remove comments from XML string or file. I am using XMl file in this example: I found two possible ways to achieve this.

Lets say we need a function named RemoveCommentsFromXMLFile(string sourceFilePath, string destinationFilePath), which reads xml from source file and then save a copy of same xml content to destination file after removing comments.

• Remove comments from XML content before loading from a source.

  public static void RemoveCommentsFromConfigFile(string sourceFilePath, string destinationFilePath)
  {
   XmlReaderSettings readerSettings = new XmlReaderSettings();
   readerSettings.IgnoreComments = true; //set this flag in readsettings to read xml without comments.
  
   XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(sourceFilePath, readerSettings);
  
   XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
   xmlDoc.Load(reader);
   reader.Close();
   xmlDoc.Save(destinationFilePath);
  }
  

• Remove comments from XML content after loading from a source.

  public static void RemoveCommentsFromConfigFile(string sourceFilePath, string destinationFilePath)
  {
   System.Xml.XmlDocument xmlDoc = new System.Xml.XmlDocument();
   xmlDoc.Load(sourceFilePath);
  
   System.Xml.XmlNodeList list = xmlDoc.SelectNodes("//comment()");
  
   foreach (System.Xml.XmlNode node in list)
   {
    node.ParentNode.RemoveChild(node);
   }
  
   xmlDoc.Save(destinationFilePath);
  }