c# regex output string is not according to my expectations

Question

I am using the following code to retrieve the shipping cost from amazon.com via scanning the html source of any product's page. But the output is not what i want. Below it the code.

regexString = "<span class=\"plusShippingText\">(.*)</span>";
match = Regex.Match(htmlSource, regexString);
string shipCost = match.Groups[1].Value;
MessageBox.Show(shipCost);

It show an message box that show the return shipping cost as

&nbsp;+&nbsp;Free Shipping</span>

But actually I need the following clean text only.

Free Shipping

Please help me to solve this problem.

Answer 1

you jst need to remove the HTML tags you can use following function:

shipCost = System.Net.WebUtility.HtmlDecode(shipCost).Replace("+","").Trim()

Answer 2

Can you try the following code (though it's a bad idea to use regex for HTML parsing):

string shipCostHtml = Regex.Match(htmlSource, "(?<=<span class=\"plusShippingText\">).*?(?=</span>)").Value;
string shipCost = System.Net.WebUtility.HtmlDecode(shipCostHtml);
shipCost = shipCost.Trim(' ', '+', '\xa0');

Your regex is almost fine, you just need to replace greedy (.*) with lazy (.*?).

How could it have been solved using HtmlAgilityPack.

HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(htmlSource);
string shipCostHtml = doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//span[@class='plusShippingText']").InnerText;
string shipCost = System.Net.WebUtility.HtmlDecode(shipCostHtml);
shipCost = shipCost.Trim(' ', '+', '\xa0');

Now you're protected against the case when Amazon decides to add some additional attributes to <span>, ex.: <span class='plusShippingText newClass'> or <span style='{color:blue}' class='plusShippingText'>, etc.