Parsing html with the HTML Agility Pack and Linq

Question

I have the following HTML

(..)
<tbody>
 <tr>
  <td class="name"> Test1 </td>
  <td class="data"> Data </td>
  <td class="data2"> Data 2 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td class="name"> Test2 </td>
  <td class="data"> Data2 </td>
  <td class="data2"> Data 2 </td>
 </tr>
</tbody>
(..)

The information I have is the name => so "Test1" & "Test2". What I want to know is how can I get the data that's in "data" and "data2" based on the Name I have.

Currently I'm using:

var data =
    from
        tr in doc.DocumentNode.Descendants("tr")
    from   
        td in tr.ChildNodes.Where(x => x.Attributes["class"].Value == "name")
    where
        td.InnerText == "Test1"
    select tr;

But I get {"Object reference not set to an instance of an object."} when I try to look in data

Answer 1

As for your attempt, you have two issues with your code:

1. ChildNodes is weird - it also returns whitespace text nodes, which don't have a class attributes (can't have attributes, of course).
2. As James Walford commented, the spaces around the text are significant, you probably want to trim them.

With these two corrections, the following works:

var data =
      from tr in doc.DocumentNode.Descendants("tr")
      from td in tr.Descendants("td").Where(x => x.Attributes["class"].Value == "name")
     where td.InnerText.Trim() == "Test1"
    select tr;

Answer 2

Here is the XPATH way - hmmm... everyone seems to have forgotten about the power XPATH and concentrate exclusively on C# XLinq, these days :-)

This function gets all data values associated with a name:

public static IEnumerable<string> GetData(HtmlDocument document, string name)
{
    return from HtmlNode node in
        document.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//td[@class='name' and contains(text(), '" + name + "')]/following-sibling::td")
        select node.InnerText.Trim();
}

For example, this code will dump all 'Test2' data:

    HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
    doc.Load(yourHtml);

    foreach (string data in GetData(doc, "Test2"))
    {
        Console.WriteLine(data);
    }

Answer 3

Here's one approach - first parse all data into a data structure, and then read it. This is a little messy and certainly needs more validation, but here goes:

HtmlWeb hw = new HtmlWeb();
HtmlDocument doc = hw.Load("http://jsbin.com/ezuge4");
HtmlNodeCollection nodes = doc.DocumentNode
                              .SelectNodes("//table[@id='MyTable']//tr");
var data = nodes.Select(
    node => node.Descendants("td")
        .ToDictionary(descendant => descendant.Attributes["class"].Value,
                      descendant => descendant.InnerText.Trim())
        ).ToDictionary(dict => dict["name"]);
string test1Data = data["Test1"]["data"];

Here I turn every <tr> to a dictionary, where the class of the <td> is a key and the text is a value. Next, I turn the list of dictionaries into a dictionary of dictionaries (tip - abstract that away), where the name of every <tr> is the key.

Answer 4

instead of

td.InnerText == "Test1"

try

td.InnerText == " Test1 "

or

d.InnerText.Trim() == "Test1"

Answer 5

I can recommend one of two ways:

http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/, which converts the html to valid xml which can then be queried against with OOTB Linq.

Or,

Linq to HTML (http://www.superstarcoders.com/linq-to-html.aspx), which while not maintained on CodePlex ( that was a hint, Keith ), gives a reasonable working set of features to springboard from.