Question

I have an html table

  <table border='0' width='100%'>         <tr class='headerbg'>             <th width='5%'>                 No             </th>             <th width='30%'>                 Name             </th>             <th width='20%'>                 Department or Division             </th>             <th width='25%'>                 Email             </th>             <th width='20%'>                 Staff/Student             </th>         </tr>         <tr class='bg2'>             <td>                 1             </td>             <td>                 <strong><a class='searchLink2' href='tel_search.php?fore=Dave&amp;sur=Rumber'>Dave Rumber</a></strong>             </td>             <td>                 Medical School             </td>             <td>                 <a class='searchLink2' href='mailto:[e-mail]'>[e-mail]</a>             </td>             <td>                 Student&nbsp;             </td>         </tr>     </table> 

Sometimes there will be more than one row of people results. I would like to be able to go through each row and pluck out the name and e-mail information and do some other processing. Put the data in a datagrid, and possibly into a database.

I guess my question is how do I do this?

  string table = GetContents(buffer);    table = table.Replace(' ', '');   table = table.Replace('&', '&');    XElement inters = XElement.Parse(table); 

I can put it into an XElement but I am not quite sure where to go from here!

Thanks!

Answer 1

Here’s some freehand code that should get you started. Don’t do this in production, this is an educational demonstration only.

List<XElement> rows = inters   .Descendants   .Where(x => x.Name == 'tr')   .Skip(1) //header   .ToList(); // // and now to turn rows into people List<Person> people = rows   //filter to anchor.  should be two.   .Select(r => r.Descendants.Where(a => a.Name = 'a'))   //Project each anchor pair into a Person   .Select(g => new Person()   {     Name = g.First().Value,     Email = g.Skip(1).First().Value   })   .ToList();