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XML Document Literal (Visual Basic)

A literal representing an XDocument object.

<?xml version="1.0" [encoding="encoding"] [standalone="standalone"] ?>
[ piCommentList ]
rootElement
[ piCommentList ]

Parts

Term

Definition

encoding

Optional. Literal text declaring which encoding the document uses.

standalone

Optional. Literal text. Must be "yes" or "no".

piCommentList

Optional. List of XML processing instructions and XML comments. Takes the following format:

piComment [ piComment ... ]

Each piCommentcan be one of the following:

rootElement

Required. Root element of the document. The format is one of the following:

For more information, see Embedded Expressions in XML (Visual Basic).

Return Value

An XDocument object.

Remarks

An XML document literal is identified by the XML declaration at the start of the literal. Although each XML document literal must have exactly one root XML element, it can have any number of XML processing instructions and XML comments.

An XML document literal cannot appear in an XML element.

Note

An XML literal can span multiple lines without using line continuation characters. This enables you to copy content from an XML document and paste it directly into a Visual Basic program.

The Visual Basic compiler converts the XML document literal into calls to the #ctor and #ctor constructors.

Example

The following example creates an XML document that has an XML declaration, a processing instruction, a comment, and an element that contains another element.

Dim libraryRequest As XDocument = 
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
    <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="show_book.xsl"?>
    <!-- Tests that the application works. -->
    <books>
        <book/>
    </books>
Console.WriteLine(libraryRequest)

See Also

Reference

XML Processing Instruction Literal (Visual Basic)

XML Comment Literal (Visual Basic)

XML Element Literal (Visual Basic)

XElement

XProcessingInstruction

XComment

XDocument

Concepts

Embedded Expressions in XML (Visual Basic)

Other Resources

XML Literals (Visual Basic)

Creating XML in Visual Basic