Parsing HTML page with HtmlAgilityPack
There are a number of ways to select elements using the agility pack.
Let's assume we have defined our HtmlDocument
as follows:
string html = @"<TD class=texte width=""50%"">
<DIV align=right>Name :<B> </B></DIV></TD>
<TD width=""50%"">
<INPUT class=box value=John maxLength=16 size=16 name=user_name>
</TD>
<TR vAlign=center>";
HtmlDocument htmlDoc = new HtmlDocument();
htmlDoc.LoadHtml(html);
1. Simple LINQ
We could use the Descendants()
method, passing the name of an element we are in search of:
var inputs = htmlDoc.DocumentNode.Descendants("input");
foreach (var input in inputs)
{
Console.WriteLine(input.Attributes["value"].Value);
// John
}
2. More advanced LINQ
We could narrow that down by using fancier LINQ:
var inputs = from input in htmlDoc.DocumentNode.Descendants("input")
where input.Attributes["class"].Value == "box"
select input;
foreach (var input in inputs)
{
Console.WriteLine(input.Attributes["value"].Value);
// John
}
3. XPath
Or we could use XPath.
string name = htmlDoc.DocumentNode
.SelectSingleNode("//td/input")
.Attributes["value"].Value;
Console.WriteLine(name);
//John
HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(html);
XPathNavigator docNav = doc.CreateNavigator();
XPathNavigator node = docNav.SelectSingleNode("//td/input/@value");
if (node != null)
{
Console.WriteLine("result: " + node.Value);
}
I wrote this pretty quickly, so you'll want to do some testing with more data.
NOTE: The XPath strings apparently have to be in lower-case.
EDIT: Apparently the beta now supports Linq to Objects directly, so there's probably no need for the converter.