Store all values from as a list in Codebehind

Question

Normally I would just do:

List<string> list = new List<string>();
    foreach(string element in ul_myLst)
    {
        list.Add(element);
    }

but I'm not really sure how since it doesn't have get enumerator.

Essentially I just want to do some version of storing all the values of an un ordered list into a list in the codebehind. Also sorry if this is a repost, but I only found people inserting items to a list and not saving items from a list.

Answer 1

Would something like this work for you?

html:

<ul runat="server" id="ul_myLst">
 <li runat=server>item1</li>
 <li runat=server>item2</li>
 <li runat=server>item3</li>
</ul>

code behind:

List<string> ListOfStuff = new List<string>();
foreach (Control item in ul_myLst.Controls)
{
   if (item is System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlGenericControl)
        {
           ListOfStuff.Add(((System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlGenericControl)item).InnerHtml); 
        }
}

Answer 2

You will need an HTML parser to do this. Dont use a regex to parse HTML.

You could use HtmlAgilityPack.

Markup:

<ul id="ul_myLst" runat="server">
     <li>1</li>
     <li>2</li>
     <li>3</li>
     <li>4</li>
     <li>5</li>
</ul>

Code behind:

HtmlGenericControl ul_myLst = (HtmlGenericControl)this.Page.FindControl("ul_myLst");

HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(ul_myLst.InnerHtml);

List<string> result = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("li").Select(x => x.InnerText).ToList();

This gives you a list containing:

1 2 3 4 5