Ignored Content (Syntax Parsing Engine)

This topic explains how to access the ignored content produced during syntax analysis.

The following topics are prerequisites to understanding this topic:

Even though the syntax analyzer ignores insignificant tokens and skips unexpected tokens, they are still stored in the syntax tree because the syntax tree must represent the full content of the document. When the syntax analyzer comes across content which it can ignore, it gathers it up and stores it as “ignored content” on the next token node which is not ignored. This content is then accessible with the GetLeadingIgnoredContent method on the token node and all its ancestor nodes for which it is the first token node. This method returns an IgnoredContentList class, which is a collection with the following key members:

The indexer of the IgnoredContentList collection returns IgnoredContent values, which represent a single piece of ignored content.

The following topics provide additional information related to this topic.