How to remove a Bookmark from a document? - openxml

Question

Because OOXML documents don't seem to follow proper XML rules, a Bookmark consists of a BookmarkStart, a BookmarkEnd and an arbitrary number of elements in-between; not a hierarchy but a single flow of elements which have to be traversed in the right order:
<w:bookmarkStart w:id="4" w:name="Author"/>
<w:r w:rsidR="009878B3"><w:rPr><w:sz w:val="28"/></w:rPr><w:t><</w:t></w:r>
<w:r w:rsidR="005E0909"><w:rPr><w:sz w:val="28"/></w:rPr><w:t xml:space="preserve"> </w:t></w:r>
<w:r w:rsidR="009878B3"><w:rPr><w:sz w:val="28"/></w:rPr><w:t>Author></w:t></w:r>
<w:bookmarkEnd w:id="4"/>
I already ran into this problem in a related question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28219201/how-to-get-the-text-of-a-bookmark-as-a-single-string
But this question is, how can I remove the Bookmark entirely from the document, without breaking anything? Do I have to iterate through siblings from the BookmarkStart until I reach a BookmarkEnd? Is there some useful API method which makes up for the failure to use XML properly whereby one would just have a Bookmark node which could be deleted?!

Answer 1

You can just remove the BookmarkStart via the API and it will remove the corresponding BookmarkEnd for you and leave any contents intact. In C# something like this should work:
public static void RemoveBookmark(string filename, string bookmarkName)
{
using (WordprocessingDocument wordDocument = WordprocessingDocument.Open(filename, true))
{
Body body = wordDocument.MainDocumentPart.Document.Body;
//find a matching BookmarkStart based on name
BookmarkStart start = body.Descendants<BookmarkStart>().FirstOrDefault(b => b.Name == bookmarkName);
if (start == null)
{
throw new Exception(string.Format("Bookmark {0} not found", bookmarkName));
}
//this is clever enough to remove the BookmarkStart and BookmarkEnd
start.Remove();
wordDocument.MainDocumentPart.Document.Save();
}
}