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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T10:43:06+00:00

I’m looking for an efficient means of extracting an html fragment from an html

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I’m looking for an efficient means of extracting an html “fragment” from an html document. My first implementation of this used the Html Agility Pack. This appeared to be a reasonable way to attack this problem, until I started running the extraction on large html documents – performance was very poor for something so trivial (I’m guessing due to the amount of time it was taking to parse the entire document).

Can anyone suggest a more efficient means of achieving my goal?

To summarize:

  1. For my purposes, an html “fragment”
    is defined as all content inside of
    the <body> tags of an html
    document

  2. Ideally, I’d like to return the
    content unaltered if it didn’t
    contain an <html> or <body>
    (I’ll assume I was passed an html
    fragment to begin with)

  3. I have the entire html document available in memory (as a string), I won’t be streaming it on demand – so a potential solution won’t need to worry about that.

  4. Performance is critical, so a potential solution should account for this.

Sample Input:

<html>
   <head>
     <title>blah</title>
   </head>
   <body>
    <p>My content</p>
   </body>
</html>

Desired Output:

<p>My content</p>

A solution in C# or VB.NET would be welcome.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Most html is not going to be XHTML compliant. I would do an HTTP get request and search the resultant text for .Contains("<body>") and .Contains("</body>"). You can use these two locations as your start and stop indexes for a reader stream. Outside the body tag you really don’t need to worry about XML compliance.

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