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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T19:11:38+00:00

So, say I’m parsing the following HTML string: <html> <head> RANDOM JAVASCRIPT AND CSS

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So, say I’m parsing the following HTML string:

<html>
    <head>
        RANDOM JAVASCRIPT AND CSS AHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
    </head>
    <body>
        <table class="table">
            <tr><a href="/subdir/members/Name">Name</a></tr>
            <tr><a href="/subdir/members/Name">Name</a></tr>
            <tr><a href="/subdir/members/Name">Name</a></tr>
            <tr><a href="/subdir/members/Name">Name</a></tr>
            <tr><a href="/subdir/members/Name">Name</a></tr>
            <tr><a href="/subdir/members/Name">Name</a></tr>
            <tr><a href="/subdir/members/Name">Name</a></tr>
            <tr><a href="/subdir/members/Name">Name</a></tr>
            <tr><a href="/subdir/members/Name">Name</a></tr>
            <tr><a href="/subdir/members/Name">Name</a></tr>
        </table>
    <body>
</html>

and I want to isolate the contents of ** (everything inside of the table class)

Now, I used regex to accomplish this:

string pagesource = (method that extracts the html source and stores it into a string);
string[] splitSource = Regex.Split(pagesource, "<table class=/"member/">;
string memberList = Regex.Split(splitSource[1], "</table>");
//the list of table members will be in memberList[0];
//method to extract links from the table
ExtractLinks(memberList[0]);

I’ve been looking at other ways to do this extraction, and I came across the Match object in C#.

I’m attempting to do something like this:

Match match = Regex.Match(pageSource, "<table class=\"members\">(.|\n)*?</table>");

The purpose of the above was to hopefully extract a match value between the two delimiters, but, when I try to run it the match value is:

match.value = </table>

MY question, as such, is: is there a way to extract data from my string that is slightly easier/more readable/shorter than my method using regex? For this simple example, regex is fine, but for more complex examples, I find myself with the coding equivalent of scribbles all over my screen.

I would really like to use match, because it seems like a very neat and tidy class, but I can’t seem to get it working for my needs. Can anyone help me with this?

Thank you very much!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use an HTML parser, like HTML Agility Pack.

    var doc = new HtmlDocument();

using (var wc = new WebClient())
using (var stream = wc.OpenRead(url))
{
    doc.Load(stream);
}

var table = doc.DocumentElement.Element("html").Element("body").Element("table");
string tableHtml = table.OuterHtml;
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