{"id":2687,"date":"2016-03-18T11:50:58","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T11:50:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericwhite.com\/home2\/bm8qcmjy\/public_html\/blog\/?page_id=2687"},"modified":"2016-03-20T10:00:22","modified_gmt":"2016-03-20T10:00:22","slug":"introducing-textreplacer-a-new-class-for-powertools-for-open-xml","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.ericwhite.com\/blog\/introducing-textreplacer-a-new-class-for-powertools-for-open-xml\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing TextReplacer: A New Class for PowerTools for Open XML"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I wrote some code that implemented search-and-replacefor Open XML WordprocessingML documents<\/a>. I wrote that code for an Open XML developer who needed to implement thatfunctionality using XML DOM, although with a different language than C#.  Because XML DOM is standardized,translating the code to another language and another implementation of XML DOMis relatively straightforward.<\/p>\n

I want to introduce search-and-replace functionality in a CMDLET in PowerTools for Open XML<\/a>, but I have been moving PowerTools code away from XmlDocument, so I rewrote the search-and-replace code using LINQ to XML, using a functional transform.  It was an interesting and fun project.  The video below introduces the TextReplacer class, and compares it to the code that I presented that uses XmlDocument.  It is an interesting comparison of imperative code (using XmlDocument) and functional code (using LINQ to XML).<\/p>\n

It took me about 8 hours to write the search-and-replace code using XmlDocument.  It took me about 4 hourz to write the same code using LINQ to XML.  However, for what it\u2019s worth, I spent far longer than that on both versions of the code making sure that whatever else happens, the code will not corrupt WordprocessingML documents.<\/p>\n

Personally, I find the functional code to be much cleaner and easier to maintain.  It was also easier to debug.<\/p>\n

If you want to see a detailed description of the algorithm that I used for search-and-replace, see the previous post on search-and-replace<\/a> that uses XmlDocument.  The approach that I took with the LINQ to XML code is identical in nature to the code that uses XmlDocument.  This will be apparent in the video.<\/p>\n

I am currently in process of doing some relatively major revamps to PowerTools for Open XML, so I haven\u2019t posted this code on CodePlex yet.  You can retrieve the code as an attachment to this post.<\/p>\n