Remove chain of duplicate elements with HTML Agility Pack

Question

Remove chain of duplicate elements with HTML Agility Pack

c# html-agility-pack

Question

I'm trying to remove any duplicate or more occurrences of any   tags in my html document. This is what I've come up with so far (really stupid code):

HtmlNodeCollection elements = nodeCollection.ElementAt(0)
                             .SelectNodes("//br");

if (elements != null)
{
    foreach (HtmlNode element in elements)
    {
        if (element.Name == "br")
        {
             bool iterate = true;
             while(iterate == true)
             {
                 iterate = removeChainElements(element);
             }
         }
     }
}

private bool removeChainElements(HtmlNode element)
{
    if (element.NextSibling != null && element.NextSibling.Name == "br")
    {
        element.NextSibling.Remove();
    }
    if (element.NextSibling != null && element.NextSibling.Name == "br")
         return true;
    else
         return false;
    }
}

The code does find the br tags but it doesn't remove any elements at all.

Christer William Persson

Popular Answer

Maybe you can do this htmlsource = htmlSource.Replace(" ", );

or maybe something like this

    string html = "<br><br><br><br><br>";

    html = html.Replace("<br>", string.Empty);

    html = string.Format("{0}<br />", html);

    html = html.Replace(" ", string.Empty);
    html = html.Replace("\t", string.Empty);

JohnnBlade

View more on Stack Overflow

Alex · Accepted Answer · 7/4/2012 5:17:48 PM

I think you too complicated your solution, although the idea is seems to be correct, as I understand.

Suppose, it would be easier to find all the   nodes first, and just remove those, whose previous sibling is   node.

Let's start with the next example:

var html = @"<div>the first line<br /><br />the next one<br /></div>";
var doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(html);

now find   nodes and remove the chain of duplicate elements:

var nodes = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//br").ToArray();
foreach (var node in nodes)
    if (node.PreviousSibling != null && node.PreviousSibling.Name == "br")
        node.Remove();

and get the result of it:

var output = doc.DocumentNode.OuterHtml;

it is:

<div>the first line<br>the next one<br></div>

Remove chain of duplicate elements with HTML Agility Pack

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