How would I use the HTML Agility Pack to get the First Paragraph of text from the body of an HTML file. I'm building a DIGG style link submission tool, and want to get the title and the first paragraph of text. Title is easy, any suggestions for how I might get the first paragraph of text from the body? I guess it could be within P or DIV depending on the page.
2
votes
2 Answers
3
votes
Is this html that you control? If so, you could give the p an id or a class and find it via
//p[@id=\"YOUR ID\"] or //p[@class=\"YOUR CLASS\"]
EDIT: Since you don't control the html, maybe the below will work. It takes all the HtmlTextNodes and tries to find a grouping of text greater than the threshold specified. It's far from perfect but might get you going in the right direction.
String summary = FindSummary(page.DocumentNode);
private const int THRESHOLD = 50;
private String FindSummary(HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlNode node) {
foreach (HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlNode childNode in node.ChildNodes) {
if (childNode.GetType() == typeof(HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlTextNode)) {
if (childNode.InnerText.Length >= THRESHOLD) {
return childNode.InnerText;
}
}
String summary = FindSummary(childNode);
if (summary.Length >= THRESHOLD) {
return summary;
}
}
return String.Empty;
}