Finding specific class in HTML using C# and getting its value

Question

I'm trying to download an entire HTML page like following:

var html = new WebClient().DownloadString("http://mypage.com/");

and this HTML document contains a class like this:

<span class="mem_loc">United States</span>

Like this literally...

I need to find somehow now this class mem_loc and it's value , which is United states or any other country...

Is there any "easy" way that this could be done in C# ?

P.S. The structure of the Tag is always like this , so I can probably search it through the string or somehow?

P.S. I want to fetch only whats between > < values, which is a country name...

Darin Dimitrov · Accepted Answer · 2017-01-22 14:50:28Z

3

One way to achieve this is to use an HTML parser. For example HTML agility pack is one such tool. It allows you to do this:

var result = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//span[@class='mem_loc']"));

answered Jan 22, 2017 at 14:50

Darin Dimitrov

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6 Comments

User987 Over a year ago

good suggestion, can this be done with using just regular regex, without any external library? =)

Darin Dimitrov Over a year ago

Yes, it can be done using regular regex. You can read more about it here: stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/…. And once you have read this answer you can get back to HTML Agility Pack or a similar HTML parsing tool.

User987 Over a year ago

Darin cool ty, what'cha think which way is better? I mean adding an entire new library just because of 1 line of code isn't a very good idea no ?

User987 Over a year ago

Darin hahahh that was a good one :D ... Okay I understand it now better =D

Darin Dimitrov Over a year ago

There's a difference between 1 line of code, and code that works in production. So it will all depend on your scenario. If you want to be mocking something real quick for a presentation or a dummy website then of course you can use a regex. But if you want to write code that works in a production system then believe me, you don't want to be using regex for parsing HTML.

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