So, i'm looking for a bit of help. It's not a particularly hard task, it's just it'll take me a while and i need to go do some study. Basically, i need a method which parses XML-like data and adds the element name and the element contents to a Dictionary. It is fairly trivial, but i don't like the idea of having to think through all the string mangling required ;) First person to get me a method which works gets 10 brownie points.

You need to be able to handle something like this:
http://monoport.com/5078 (sorry for pasting there, but blogger borks on the XML tags)

Thing is, this is, technically speaking, invalid XML. The tag should be escaped, and the '&' in ObjectFileName should also be escaped. Unfortunately, i can't rely on the source of this XML being fixed any time soon, so i need to be able to hand parse the XML. I've outlined a procedure at the end which should be able to handle most of the mess that will be thrown at it. The only thing i'll add is that the manual parser doesn't have to cope with every eventuality. If something goes wrong (for example an artist called themselves which breaks the parsing) then don't worry, just abort. This is a last ditch effort to parse. It should succeed 99% of the time if you follow the procedure below.

Here's some psuedo code:
while(currentIndex < nexttag =" string.IndexOf('<'," elementname =" string.SubString(nextTag,">', currentPosition); // read the element name

currentPosition += the number of characters i've just 'parsed'.
string data = string.SubString(currentPosition, string.IndexOf("'); // The contents are between currentPosition and the end tag.
currentPosition += data.Length;
currentPosition += length of closing tag;

if(nextCharacter != '<') AbortParse(); // If the next character is not '<', then something has gone wrong, so give up. myDictionary.Add(elementName, contents);