C# Convert Relative to Absolute Links in HTML String

Question

I\'m mirroring some internal websites for backup purposes. As of right now I basically use this c# code:

System.Net.WebClient client = new System.Net.WebCli         


        

Answer 1

The most robust solution would be to use the HTMLAgilityPack as others have suggested. However a reasonable solution using regular expressions is possible using the Replace overload that takes a MatchEvaluator delegate, as follows:

var baseUri = new Uri("http://test.com");
var pattern = @"(?src|href)=""(?/[^""]*)""";
var matchEvaluator = new MatchEvaluator(
    match =>
    {
        var value = match.Groups["value"].Value;
        Uri uri;

        if (Uri.TryCreate(baseUri, value, out uri))
        {
            var name = match.Groups["name"].Value;
            return string.Format("{0}=\"{1}\"", name, uri.AbsoluteUri);
        }

        return null;
    });
var adjustedHtml = Regex.Replace(originalHtml, pattern, matchEvaluator);

The above sample searches for attributes named src and href that contain double quoted values starting with a forward slash. For each match, the static Uri.TryCreate method is used to determine if the value is a valid relative uri.

Note that this solution doesn't handle single quoted attribute values and certainly doesn't work on poorly formed HTML with unquoted values.