Question

HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(content);

var nodes = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//div[@class=\"noprint res\"]/div");
if (nodes != null)
{
    foreach (HtmlNode data in nodes)
    {
                  // Works but not what I want
                  MessageBox.Show(data.InnerHtml);

                  // Should work ? but does not ?
                  MessageBox.Show(data.SelectSingleNode("//span[@class=\"pp-place-title\"]").InnerText);
    }
}

I am trying to parse the results of a HTML, the initial node for the foreach, works just as expected and gives me a result of 10 items which matchs what I need.

When I get into the foreach, if I output the inner html of the data item it display the correct data but if I output the SelectSingleNode it will always display the data from the first item from the foreach, is that a normal behavior or am I doing something wrong ?

In order to resolve the issue I had to create a new html inside the foreach for every data item like this:

HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument innerDoc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();
innerDoc.LoadHtml(data.InnerHtml);

// Select what I need
MessageBox.Show(innerDoc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//span[@class=\"pp-place-title\"]").InnerText);

Then I get the correct per item data.

The page I was trying to get data from was http://maps.google.com/maps?q=consulting+loc:+US if u want to try and see what happens for yourself.

Basically I am reading the left side column for company names and the above happens.

Answer 1

By starting your XPath expression with //, you’re searching in the entire document that contains the data node.

You should be able to use ".//[...]" to only check nodes within data.