Question

I’ve to parse over a piece of HTML.
It looks a bit like:

<table>
   <tr>
     <td class="blabla"> <table><tr><td><table><tr><td></td></tr></table></td></tr></table>
     </td>
   </tr>
  <tr>
     <td class="blabla"> <table><tr><td></td></tr></table>
     </td>
   </tr>
</table>

I need to extract each td with class blabla, but each of these cells could have 0 or more nested tables with many nested td’s. I want to get

<td class="blabla"> ... many nested stuff ... </td>

Thanks

Answer 1

Don’t try to parse HTML with regular expressions. You can’t write an expression that will match what you want, because HTML isn’t regular.

Use an HTML/XML parser in a library your language provides. System.Xml has a number of useful classes that will let you open your file and query it with XPath.

The XPath expression you’re looking for is

//td[@class="someClass"]