Question

I’m reading in a huge HTML string that has some info I need to extract from it. I can set up the search parameters (where to parse), but how can I achieve this without saving to a temp file then using StreamReader?

Example:

//Pertinent data starts here:
<!--
   body for the page starts here
-->

    <table border="0" >
      <tr>
        <td class='HeaderTD'><b>User Name</b></td>
        <td class='HeaderTD'><b>Mark TheMan</b></td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td class='DataTD_Black_Bold '>Department</td>
        <td class='DataTD'>Programming</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td class='DataTD_Black_Bold '>Office Phone</td>
        <td class='DataTD'>555-555-5555</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td class='DataTD_Black_Bold '>Office Ext</td>
        <td class='DataTD'>x5555</td>

I need to just set some attributes in a class to the various fields (which are strings):

User.UserName = "Mark TheMan";
User.Department = "Programming";
User.OfficePhone = "555-555-5555";

etc.

You see I need to search for a line that contains something like "<b>User Name</b>" then return the next line so I can parse out the desired data. Let me know if you need more info, thanks!

Answer 1

You should use Html parser, HtmlAgilityPack is very good.

Here is a little console application to show you how easy is to rip the data from tables :

static void Main(string[] args)
{
  HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
  doc.Load("example.html");
  foreach (HtmlNode table in doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//table"))
  {
    foreach (HtmlNode row in table.SelectNodes("tr"))
    {
      foreach (HtmlNode cell in row.SelectNodes("th|td"))
      {
        Console.WriteLine("Cell value : " + cell.InnerText);
      }
    }
  }
}

And for your example output will be :

Cell value : User Name
Cell value : Mark TheMan
Cell value : Department
Cell value : Programming
Cell value : Office Phone
Cell value : 555-555-5555