Question

I have a C# Form with WebBrowser object.
This object contains HTML Document.
And there is a link in that document that has no markers (no id and no name)
How can I access this element??

I tried to use this:

webBrowser1.Document.GetElementsByTagName("a")[n] 

But it is not very useful, because if there will be some new link on the page, I’ll need to rebuild all program.

I also can not do loops through document, or get a substring of Document.ToString() because then I can not click the link.

Would be great if you could give me some advice.

Answer 1

In this kind of situation the best idea is always to find an “Anchor”, meaning – a place in the document that never change.

Lets say that

<a href="http://site.com">dada</a>

Doesn’t have an ID or Name, so the closest you can go is check if the parent of the element you’re looking for has an ID.

<div id="parentDiv">
      Some text
      Some other stuff
      <a href="http://site.com">The link you're looking for</a>
</div>

That way you could get the parentDiv, which you know doesn’t change, and then the A tag inside that parent (which should be permanent unless that website completely changes the structure which is one of the problems in parsing external HTML pages)

Shai.