CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#htmlwpfhtml-agility-pack
Luke
Luke

Reputation: 109

How do I access the content of multiple <div> tags with HTMLAgilityPack?

I am unable to find the documentation for the HTMLAgilityPack on the codeplex website. Currently what I want to do is access a div on the Amazon website, and scrape text information for use in a WPF application. 

var getWeb = new HtmlWeb();                     
var doc = getWeb.Load(uri);
HtmlNode ourNode = doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//div[@id = 'zg_centerListWrapper']");

This div contains about 12 other divs, each one is an item in the best sellers category.

In order to access the properties of each one would appear to be painstaking (and I'm also not entirely sure how I'd do it on first glance). So should I instead use DocumentNode.SelectNodes()? And how would I implement it? Also I find it hard to believe that after such a time there isn't documentation for the HTMLAgilityPack... Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places because youtube seems to be my best source at the moment.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1028

Answers (2)

har07
har07

Reputation: 89295

Actually, parameter of SelectNodes() and SelectSingleNode() is an xpath expression, xpath version 1.0 to be precise (see xpath 1.0 spec here).

XPath is another technology with it's own specification, documentation, and discussion. You can generally search for xpath tutorials or articles instead of HtmlAgilityPack (HAP) specifics, to have a better idea of what kind of expression should you pass to HAP to get particular HTML elements.

For the sake of example, assume that your HTML looks like this :

<div id="zg_centerListWrapper">
    <div>I want this</div>
    <div>..and this</div>
    <div>..and this one too</div>
</div>

see that divs you're interested in are direct children of the div[@id = 'zg_centerListWrapper'], then you can use the following xpath to get them :

var xpath = "//div[@id = 'zg_centerListWrapper']/div";
HtmlNodeCollection ourNodes = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes(xpath);

Upvotes: 1

Filip
Filip

Reputation: 1864

You can use DocumentNode.Descendants("div") and then something like 

.Where(div => div.Attributes.Contains("class") && div.Attributes["class"].Value.Contains("best category"))

But yeah, documentation would certainly help..

Upvotes: 0

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