Can I use Html Agility Pack To Parse HTML Fragment?

7
votes

Can Html Agility Pack be used to parse an html string fragment?

Such As:

var fragment = "<b>Some code </b>";

Then extract all <b> tags? All the examples I seen so far have been loading like html documents.

3
c#.nethtml-agility-pack
It could be done even simlier with HAP, in one line: var text = HtmlNode.CreateNode("<b>Some code </b>").InnerText; - Oleks

3 Answers

10
votes

If it's html then yes.

string str = "<b>Some code</b>";
// not sure if needed
string html = string.Format("<html><head></head><body>{0}</body></html>", str);
HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(html);

// look xpath tutorials for how to select elements
// select 1st <b> element
HtmlNode bNode = doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("b[1]");
string boldText = bNode.InnerText;
2
votes

I dont think this is really the best use of HtmlAgilityPack.

Normally I see people trying to parse large amounts of html using regular expressions and I point them towards HtmlAgilityPack but in this case I think it would be better to use a regex.

Roy Osherove has a blog post describing how you can strip out all the html from a snippet:

Even if you did get the correct xpath with Mika Kolari's sample this would only work for a snippet with a <b> tag in it and would break if the code changed.

0
votes

This answer came up when I searched for the same thing. I don't know if the features have changed since it was answered but this below should be better.

$string = '<b>Some code </b>'
[HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlNode]::CreateNode($string)