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.
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1It could be done even simlier with HAP, in one line: `var text = HtmlNode.CreateNode("Some code ").InnerText;` – Oleks Mar 04 '12 at 15:31
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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;
Mike Koder
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Hmm thanks but I copied and pasted that code into a console app and imported html agility back but on HtmlNode line I get a null reference exception. – chobo2 Mar 29 '10 at 18:38
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Maybe it's HtmlNode bNode = doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("/b[1]"); – Mike Koder Mar 30 '10 at 04:36
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Try HtmlNode bNode = doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//b[1]"); – Rohit Agarwal Apr 06 '10 at 21:16
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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.
rtpHarry
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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)
Dennis Rutherford
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