I need to get all the content inside the body tag of an HTML file using C#. Are there any good and effective ways of doing this?
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1Is this a file on disk or a webpage you're pulling down?Roman– Roman2010-10-27 20:32:50 +00:00Commented Oct 27, 2010 at 20:32
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1Sorry, just starting to accept, my mistakeRasmus Christensen– Rasmus Christensen2010-10-27 20:41:21 +00:00Commented Oct 27, 2010 at 20:41
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and yes I'm the owner of the file that need parsingRasmus Christensen– Rasmus Christensen2010-10-27 20:41:40 +00:00Commented Oct 27, 2010 at 20:41
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7 Answers
Check out the HTML Agility Pack to do all sorts of HTML manipulation
It gives you an interface somewhat similar to the XmlDocument XML handling interface:
HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.Load("file.htm");
HtmlNode bodyNode = doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("/html/body");
if(bodyNode != null)
{
// do something
}
Comments
You may take a look at SgmlReader and HTML Agility Pack.
4 Comments
Asbjørn Ulsberg
That URL to SgmlReader leads to a very old version that hasn't been touched in years. The guys maintaining SgmlReader these days are MindTouch. I would recommend SgmlReader over HtmlAgilityPack due to its lower level approach and active maintenance. developer.mindtouch.com/en/docs/SgmlReader
nrkn
If your HTML isn't wellformed XHTML I think you'll find that SgmlReader (and yeah use the mindtouch version as in the comment above) is your best bet.
Alohci
@asbjomu - Looking through the conversion examples on the mindtouch site, I can't find a single one where SgmlReader produces a DOM that matches what browsers do. I don't know whether HTML Agility Pack is any better, but I wasn't impressed.
Asbjørn Ulsberg
@Alohci I agree that SgmlReader isn't up to par with browser parsers, but there aren't many alternatives native to C# that does it better. HtmlAgilityPack surely doesn't.
Its easy enough to pull the page code into a string, and simply search for the occurrence of the string "<body" and the string "</body", and just do a little math to get your value...
Comments
Reading the Html Structure into Html String and Getting the Body Tag content using C# without HtmlAgility packages
private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
string filepath = @"C:\Users\Testing\Documents\sample1.txt";
string htmlString = File.ReadAllText(filepath);
string htmlTagPattern = "<.*?>";
Regex oRegex = new Regex(".*?<body.*?>(.*?)</body>.*?", RegexOptions.Multiline);
htmlString = oRegex.Replace(htmlString, string.Empty);
htmlString = Regex.Replace(htmlString, htmlTagPattern, string.Empty);
htmlString = Regex.Replace(htmlString, @"^\s+$[\r\n]*", "", RegexOptions.Multiline);
htmlString = htmlString.Replace(" ", string.Empty);
}
1 Comment
Naveen
its not getting proper result.
If it happens to be XHTML, then you could use XPath.
Comments
Use XML methods, XPath. For more advanced manipulation with html use HTML Agility pack.
Comments
To save you the math in the accepted answer:
var start = html.IndexOf("<body>") + "<body>".Length;
var end = html.IndexOf("</body>");
var result = html.Substring(start, end - start);
Mind that it's not 100% bulletproof:
- It will fail on CDATA blocks containing
<body> - It will fail if you have something like
<body lang="en">
So all in all you are probably better off with the Agility Pack, unless you know for sure, which HTML you are working with.
