Home/ Questions/Q 8105215
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-06T00:06:17+00:00

Here is the super simple code i have: HtmlDocument htmlDoc = new HtmlDocument(); htmlDoc.OptionWriteEmptyNodes

  • 0

Here is the super simple code i have:

HtmlDocument htmlDoc = new HtmlDocument();
htmlDoc.OptionWriteEmptyNodes = true;
htmlDoc.Load("sourcefilepath");
htmlDoc.Save("destfilepath", Encoding.UTF8);

Input:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8"/>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="main.css" type="text/css"/>
  </head>
  <body>lots of text here, obviously not relevant to this problem</body>
</html>

Output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" />
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="main.css" type="text/css" />
  </head>
  <body>lots of text here, obviously not relevant to this problem</body>
</html>

You can see that in the first line there is an error: /> instead of ?>
This happens if i set OptionWriteEmptyNodes to true value. It has been set to true, because otherwise meta/link tags(and some others in the document body) won’t be closed.

Anyone know how to solve this?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Seems like a bug. You should report it to http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com.

    Still, you can workaround that bug like this:

    HtmlNode.ElementsFlags.Remove("meta");
HtmlNode.ElementsFlags.Remove("link");
HtmlDocument htmlDoc = new HtmlDocument();
htmlDoc.Load("sourcefilepath");
htmlDoc.Save("destfilepath", Encoding.UTF8);

    Just remove the flags from the meta & link tags that instruct the Html Agility Pack not to close them automatically, and don’t set OptionWriteEmptyNodes to true.

    It will produce this (note this is slightly different):

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8"></meta>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="main.css" type="text/css"></link>
  </head>
  <body>lots of text here, obviously not relevant to this problem</body>
</html>
    • 0