Verifying if two XML strings are equivalent using XmlDiffPatch

I come across a requirement for one of my projects where I need to check if two XML strings are equivalent. They might not be exact match (that would be too easy, a strings compare would do), nor have same namespaces, prefix and child order. Also, I want to be able to exclude certain nodes when comparing. I’m going to show how to achieve this using XmlDiffPatch.

Firstly, add the nuget package Microsoft.XmlDiffPatch to your project. Then, I create a method to check if two XML strings are equivalent as below

public bool AreXmlsEquivalent(string sourceXml, string expectedXml, params string[] excludedNodes)
{
    var xmlSource = XDocument.Parse(sourceXml);
    var xmlExpected = XDocument.Parse(expectedXml);

    if(excludedNodes != null && excludedNodes.Length > 0)
    {
        xmlSource.Descendants().Where(x => excludedNodes.Contains(x.Name.LocalName)).Remove();
        xmlExpected.Descendants().Where(x => excludedNodes.Contains(x.Name.LocalName)).Remove();
    }

    // See XmlDiffOptions for more information
    var xmlDiff = new XmlDiff(XmlDiffOptions.IgnoreChildOrder |
                              XmlDiffOptions.IgnoreNamespaces |
                              XmlDiffOptions.IgnoreWhitespace |
                              XmlDiffOptions.IgnorePrefixes);

    return xmlDiff.Compare(xmlSource.CreateReader(), xmlExpected.CreateReader());
}