How do I remove whitespace in HTML Source with Html Agility Pack and C#

Question

Before posting I tried the solution from this thread:

C# - Remove spaces in HTML source in between markups?

Here is a snippet of the HTML I'm working with:

<p>This is my text</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>This is next text</p>

I'm using HTML Agility Pack to clean up the HTML:

HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.Load(htmlLocation);
foreach (var item in doc.DocumentNode.Descendants("p").ToList())
{
    if (item.InnerHtml == " ")
    {
        item.Remove();
    }
}

The output of the code above is

<p>This is my text</p>





<p>This is next text</p>

So my problem is how do I remove the extra whitespace between the two paragraphs in the HTML source.

Answer 1

Remove the text nodes between the first and last paragraphs:

HTML:

var html = @"
<p>This is my text</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>This is next text</p>";

Parse it:

HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(html);
var paragraphs = doc.DocumentNode.Descendants("p").ToList();
foreach (var item in paragraphs)
{
    if (item.InnerHtml == " ") item.Remove();
}
var followingText = paragraphs[0]
    .SelectNodes(".//following-sibling::text()")
    .ToList();
foreach (var text in followingText) 
{
    text.Remove();
}

Result:

<p>This is my text</p><p>This is next text</p>

If you want to keep the line break between the paragraphs, use a for loop and call Remove() on all except the last text node.

for (int i = 0; i < followingText.Count - 1; ++i)
{
    followingText[i].Remove();
}

Result:

<p>This is my text</p>
<p>This is next text</p>