Get the value of an HTML element

Question

I have the HTML code of a webpage in a text file. I'd like my program to return the value that is in a tag. E.g. I want to get "Julius" out of

<span class="hidden first">Julius</span>

Do I need regular expression for this? Otherwise what is a string function that can do it?

You do not want regex. HTML is too complex for regex parsing. Here is the infamous answer to that point : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags — gbtimmon, Nov 05 '12 at 14:45
Also what do you actually want? Assuming you don't just want "Julius" returned everytime do you want all text between tags? All text between tags that have a class of "first"? — Fishcake, Nov 05 '12 at 14:46

Anirudha · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-20T06:05:37.227

13

You should be using an html parser like htmlagilitypack .Regex is not a good choice for parsing HTML files as HTML is not strict nor is it regular with its format.

You can use below code to retrieve it using HtmlAgilityPack

HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.Load(yourStream);

var itemList = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//span[@class='hidden first']")//this xpath selects all span tag having its class as hidden first
                  .Select(p => p.InnerText)
                  .ToList();

//itemList now contain all the span tags content having its class as hidden first

edited Aug 20 '15 at 06:05

answered Nov 05 '12 at 14:47

Anirudha

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No, the C#/.NET regex engine is certainly capable of matching non-[REGULAR](http://kore-nordmann.de/blog/do_NOT_parse_using_regexp.html#comment_40) expressions. But you are correct that other tools are a better choice for parsing HTML. – ridgerunner Nov 05 '12 at 16:37
@ridgerunner u r right..i guess `.net` has the best `regex` engine..:D – Anirudha Nov 05 '12 at 16:38

score 7 · Answer 2 · edited Nov 24 '17 at 20:28

7

I would use the Html Agility Pack to parse the HTML in C#.

edited Nov 24 '17 at 20:28

carla

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answered Nov 05 '12 at 14:45

Pablo Santa Cruz

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score 2 · Answer 3 · edited Nov 28 '17 at 03:52

2

I'd strongly recommend you look into something like the HTML Agility Pack

edited Nov 28 '17 at 03:52

wp78de

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answered Nov 05 '12 at 14:45

KingCronus

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score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 05 '12 at 16:49

i've asked the same question few days ago and ened up using HTML Agility Pack, but here is the regular expressions that you want

this one will ignore the attributes

<span[^>]*>(.*?)</span>

this one will consider the attributes

<span class="hidden first"[^>]*>(.*?)</span>

Get the value of an HTML element

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