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.
3 Answers
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; 
4 Comments
chobo2
Ok then what would I do with it how would I do some parsing?
chobo2
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.
Mike Koder
Maybe it's HtmlNode bNode = doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("/b[1]");
Rohit Agarwal
Try HtmlNode bNode = doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//b[1]");
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.
Comments
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) 
var text = HtmlNode.CreateNode("<b>Some code </b>").InnerText;