Parsing an XML Boolean

Today I came across a situation where I was taking a value from an XML file which is a boolean. Now being me I knew that someone would either use 1 or true to indicate this boolean value, I for example always use 1 and 0 but I know people that prefer the "proper" way of saying true or false, especially if you don't have an XSD handy.

The XML itself is fine however once I had loaded this XML file into my .Net application I needed to parse the value as a boolean. This is where I hit a roadblock. Bool.Parse will only parse "true" or "false" string values not "1" or "0".

A quick explore through various sources led me to find XmlConvert.ToBoolean(), which is part of System.XML. XmlConvert allows you to convert from XML Data Types to .Net Data Types and in the case of Boolean can convert 1 to true.

This saved me loads of time so I thought I'd post it up here for others to find and hopefully enjoy.