Question

I need to grab the href value from HTML like the following in C#:

<td class="tl"><a href="http://facebook.com/"target="_blank"><img src="images/poput_icon.png"/></a>

Can anyone show me how to do this? Are RegEx’s the best approach? I need to gather these from a page that contains 100s of links, but they all look like the above code. I want to ignore other href’s on the page.

Thanks in advance.

Jimmy

Answer 1

First, don’t use Regular Expressions to parse XML. See here for more detailed information on the whys and wherefores.

Second, you can use LINQ-to-XML to achieve this. Assuming you have loaded your XML snippet into an XDocument instance (and therefore, td is the root element), you can then do the following:

var href = doc
    .Element("td")
    .Element("a")
    .Attribute("href")
    .Value;