Question

I have a web page consisting of several <div> elements.

I would like to write a program that prints all the li elements inside a <div> after a certain <h4> header. Could anyone give me some help or sample code?

<div id="content">
    <h4>Header</h4>
    <ul>
        <li><a href...></a> THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO GET</li>
    </ul>
</div>

Answer 1

When it come to parsing HTML in C#, don’t try to write your own. The HTML Agility Pack is almost certainly capable of doing what you want!

What parts are constant:

1. The ‘id’ in the DIV?
2. The h4

Searching a complete HTML document and reacting on H4 alone is likely to be a mess, whereas if you know the DIV has the ID of “content” then just look for that!

var doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(yourHtml);

if ( doc.DocumentNode != null )
{
   var divs = doc.DocumentNode
                 .SelectNodes("//div")
                 .Where(e => e.Descendants().Any(e => e.Name == "h4"));

   // You now have all of the divs with an 'h4' inside of it.

   // The rest of the element structure, if constant needs to be examined to get
   // the rest of the content you're after.
}