Parsing HTML Reading Option Tag Content with HtmlAgillityPack

Question

I am trying to use HtmlAgilityPack to parse HTML, but am having problems.

Sample HTML Doc:

Answer 1

By default, the <OPTION> tag is treated by Html Agility Pack as "Empty", which means it does not need a closing </OPTION>. In this case, the closing tag is discarded. You can change this behavior using the HtmlNode.ElementFlags collection.

Here is a code that should do what you want:

HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
HtmlNode.ElementsFlags.Remove("option");
doc.LoadHtml(yourHtml);

foreach (HtmlNode node in doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//select[@id='onoffaci']//option"))
{
    Console.WriteLine("Value=" + node.Attributes["value"].Value);
    Console.WriteLine("InnerText=" + node.InnerText);
    Console.WriteLine();
}

Answer 2

You should use:

selectNode.SelectNodes("option");

instead of:

selectNode.SelectNodes("//option");

or you are starting your XPath expression from the root of the HTML document.

Answer 3

Your XPath expression:

//option

It's an absolute path: it traverse all the tree starting from the root.

You need a relative XPath expression:

descendant::option

Or the shorthand

.//option

Do note: this is the only case where to start a path with . (self::node() shorthand) is useful.