1

I have the following HTML:

<div id="main-body">
    <div id="answerform">
        //  ... a few children here i want
        <form id=mwanser">
        </form>
    </div>
</div>

I want everything in the main-body, except what is in the form tag... (and don't want the form tag itself too)....

I tried with XPath a lot but i didn't succeed.

I'm working with C# and HTMLAgilityPack, maybe there's a way to navigate to the child and delete it instead? The first option for me must be XPath too.

abatishchev
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Vincent Séguin
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2 Answers2

1

I think I have achieved this using this answer:

How to remove elements from xml using xslt with stylesheet and xsltproc?

This is done using plain XSL so I don't know if it will help with HTMLAgilityPack.

Here's the XSL that I used:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl">
    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:template match="node()|@*">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="form"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>

EDIT: just had a quick look at the HtmlAgilityPack code and found this that should have worked:

HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlNode node;
node = htmldoc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//form");
node.ParentNode.RemoveChild(node, false);

but for some reason it only deleted the opening tag.

Community
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Kioshiki
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0

With XPath if you select a node you obtain the node and every descendant in it. What you can do is select the children directly but the unwanted node. Taking your sample as a test, you can write:

"/*/*/*[not(self::form)]"
Emiliano Poggi
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  • What if i need to select the main-body too? Impossible? If my expected result would be :
    // ... a few children here i want
    – Vincent Séguin Jul 01 '11 at 12:13
  • You are trying to transform your nodes. That can not be achieved in XPath (for sure in 1.0). Use XSLT, or select the wanted node and modify it programmatically. – Emiliano Poggi Jul 01 '11 at 12:22
  • Well if i select the html without the two surroundings div, suppose the children here are a table for example, if i try to recreate the html doc after, the div doesn't matter really right? – Vincent Séguin Jul 01 '11 at 12:37
  • Yes right, you can get the children and use them to build your final html. – Emiliano Poggi Jul 01 '11 at 12:39