Find the parent div of a specific text in a HTMLDocument

Question

Find the parent div of a specific text in a HTMLDocument

.net html-agility-pack

Question

I would like to return the complete InnerText of a div where a specific text is inside.

For example: I am searching for "hello world" in the HTMLDocument (HTMLAgilityPack) and want to return the complete InnerText of the div where "hello world" was found.

This is what I tried:

HtmlNode textNode = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//text()[contains(., 'hello world')]/..")

This returned the HtmlNode where the specific text was found.

Now I want to get the first parent div of the textNode to return the complete InnerText.

Thanks in advance

jimbo

Popular Answer

Although I donÂ´t have experience with HTMLAgilityPack this does look like XPath syntax. In which case the ".." should be returning the parent of the element found.

I used this website for testing this: http://ponderer.org/download/xpath/

If you type in

//li[contains(., 'about')]/../..

in the textbox it will highlight the div containing the ul element (which contains the li element) in green.

Is this what you were looking for?

Viktor

View more on Stack Overflow

Accepted Answer

This would do it I think...

var nodes2 = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//div[contains(.//text(), 'Hello World')]");

And this is probably an even better solution:

var nodes3 = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//text()[contains(., 'Hello World')]/ancestor::div[1]");

or use the Linq-to-XML notation:

        var nodes =
            doc.DocumentNode.Descendants("div")
               .Where(
                   div =>
                   div.DescendantsAndSelf("text()").Where(text => text.InnerHtml.Contains("Hello World")).Any())

Or

        var nodes4 = from div in doc.DocumentNode.Descendants("div")
                     from text in div.DescendantsAndSelf("text()")
                     where text.InnerText.Contains("Hello World")
                     let firstParent = text.AncestorsAndSelf("div").First()
                     select firstParent;

Find the parent div of a specific text in a HTMLDocument

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