Question

I have a working statement in PHP using the simple dom parser that I want to convert into C# using the HTML Agility Pack.

I am really struggling and have not been able to get anything even close to working.

Here is the HTML I am working on: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B002UYSHMM/

Here is my PHP DOM Parser code that I want to convert to C#:

foreach($html->find('div.resultsset table tbody.result tr') as $article) 
{ 
   if($article->find('span.price', 0)) 
   {  
      // get retail  
      $item[$retail.$i++] = $article->find('span.price', 0)->plaintext;  
      // get soldby

      if($article->find('img', 0)->getAttribute('alt') <> '') 
      {
         $item[$soldby.$j++] = $article->find('ul.sellerInformation img', 0)->getAttribute('alt'); 
      }
      else 
      {
         $item[$soldby.$j++] = $article->find('ul.sellerInformation li a b', 0)->plaintext; 
      }

      $ret['SellerInfo'] = $item;
   }  
}

If anyone can help I would really appreciate it!

Answer 1

I’ve never used CSS selectors with HTMLAgilityPack but using xpath (which works similarly, but with a different syntax) it works like such:

HtmlWeb htmlWeb = new HtmlWeb();
HtmlDocument doc = htmlWeb.Load(url);
doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode(@"id('content')/div/div[1]/");

Thats about it really. You can use LINQ to handle collections when you’re not using SelectSingleNode(). So to take your example and put it in practice:

HtmlWeb htmlWeb = new HtmlWeb();
HtmlDocument doc = htmlWeb.Load(url);
var price = Decimal.Parse(doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode(@"id('price')").InnerText);
// etc...

If you need some help grabbing the XPath of a specific dom element there is a great firefox plugin named XPath Checker that will instantly get you the XPath of any dom element by right clicking. Its been very useful for me working with HTMLAgilityPack.