Question

I have a source code on a webpage that I wish to extract (I’ve narrowed it down to exactly what is relevant here:

    <div class="sideInfoPlayer">
<a class="signLink" href="spieler.php?uid=12345" title="Profile">
    <span class="wrap">Wagamama</span>
</a>

Now the trick here is that I want to get the word Wagamama into a message box but that word changes on every page of that site so I need to get that element but there is no ID on this page. Therefore I was thinking of doing a search for the class named “sideInfoPlayer” first and then find the “wrap” class within the previous class block.

I have written the below to get the first one but do not know how to tackle the second one and then get the desired value.

        HtmlElementCollection col = webBrowser1.Document.GetElementsByTagName("div");
        foreach (HtmlElement element in col)
        {
            string cls = element.GetAttribute("className");
            if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(cls) || !cls.Equals("sideInfoPlayer"))
                continue;
        }

I hope you can help unstuck me on this one.

Answer 1

You have better options. Look at http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/

And here: How can i parse html string

First you’ll need to add reference to HtmlAgilityPack library by downloading it manually or with NuGet package manager.

// loading html into HtmlDocument
var doc = new HtmlWeb().Load("http://website.com/mypage");
// walking through all nodes of interest
foreach (var node in doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//div[@class='sideInfoPlayer']/span[@class='wrap']"))
{
  // here is your text: node.InnerText
}

//div[@class='sideInfoPlayer']/span[@class='wrap'] is called Xpath Expression and this one literally means “get me all span elements with class=wrap that are children of div element with class=sideInfoPlayer.

I didn’t test it, but it should work.