Question

Lets assume I get an HTML table as a string, and I want – using C# – to dissect it to its elements (td, div – if any, etc.) and obtain each of their attributes, such as ‘style’, ‘class’…

My goal is to eventually get an HTML table and build a table object of my own out of it, retaining most (if not all) of the table’s attributes.
Now, the only way I can think of doing this, seems to me like a coding-nightmare: dissect the string to each of its ‘tr’ and ‘td’ and start digging in, looking for each of those element’s attribute and try to parse it to something I can work with – is there any other way?

Example:

string someString = "<div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td style="border-bottom:1px solid transparent;width:1px;font-size:1px;height:1px;line-height:1px;"><div class="someClass">..."

will become (in my hypothetical object):

MyTable table = new MyTable
{
   CellPadding = "0",
   ...
}

MyTableRow row = new MyTableRow 
{
   Cell[0].Style.BorderBottom = "1px solid transparent",
   Cell[0].Style.Width = "1px",
   ...
}

you get the idea 🙂

Answer 1

There’s a library called HtmlAgilityPack to parse HTML documents and give you access to the DOM in C# code.