Question

I’m following an RSS feed, which returns an XML. Inside the XML are HTML tables, returned as one long string. I’m trying to access the elements of this HTML table with C#, so that I may use each of these elements as variables for another program. An example of a table:

<table cellpadding="5"><tr><td><strong>Date (GMT)</strong></td><td><strong>Event</strong></td><td><strong>Cons.</strong></td><td><strong>Actual</strong></td><td><strong>Previous</strong></td></tr><tr><td>Jun 7 11:00</td><td>Announcement</td><td>6.250 %</td><td>6.310  %</td><td>6.560  %</td></tr></table>

Just about every similar thread on here has suggested HtmlAgilityPack, which I’m trying to use. So far, I’ve been able to pull out the HTML table and declare it as a string variable, but I can’t seem to be able to pull out the table elements. The following is my hack, based on several users’ suggestions:

XmlDocument xDoc = new XmlDocument();
xDoc.Load("http://rssfeed.com");
string descr = xDoc.SelectSingleNode("rss/channel/item/description").InnerText;

HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml("descr");
// A Print statement here (textBox1.Text = descr;) shows that I'm successfully accessing the HTML table
var table = doc.DocumentNode.Descendants("tr")
.Select(n => n.Elements("td").Select(o => o.InnerText).ToArray());

foreach (var tr in table)
{
textBox1.Text = String.Format("{0} {1} {2}", tr[0], tr[1], tr[2]);
}

Any and all suggestions are extremely welcome.

Thanks,
D

Answer 1

This worked for me, and as long as the Html works as Xml it will for you (and the values are always within a TD). The Value of a TD with a single element inside (aka the strong’s) is the same as that element’s value.

XElement table = XElement.Parse("<table cellpadding=\"5\"><tr><td><strong>Date (GMT)</strong></td><td><strong>Event</strong></td><td><strong>Cons.</strong></td><td><strong>Actual</strong></td><td><strong>Previous</strong></td></tr><tr><td>Jun 7 11:00</td><td>Announcement</td><td>6.250 %</td><td>6.310  %</td><td>6.560  %</td></tr></table>");
string[] values = table.Descendants("td").Select(td => td.Value).ToArray();

And/or the rows with value arrays:

var rows = table.Elements()
    .Select(tr => tr.Elements().Select(td => td.Value).ToArray())
    .ToList();

Update:

foreach (string value in values)
    Console.WriteLine(value);

foreach (string[] row in rows)
    foreach (string value in row)
        Console.WriteLine(value);