Html Agility Pack loop through table rows and columns

Question

Html Agility Pack loop through table rows and columns

.net c# html-agility-pack

Question

I have a table like this

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" id="table2">
    <tr>
        <th>Name
        </th>
        <th>Age
        </th>
    </tr>
        <tr>
        <td>Mario
        </td>
        <th>Age: 78
        </td>
    </tr>
            <tr>
        <td>Jane
        </td>
        <td>Age: 67
        </td>
    </tr>
            <tr>
        <td>James
        </td>
        <th>Age: 92
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

And want to use HTML Agility Pack to parse it. I have tried this code to no avail:

foreach (HtmlNode row in doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//table[@id='table2']//tr"))
{
    foreach (HtmlNode col in row.SelectNodes("//td"))
    { 
        Response.Write(col.InnerText); 
    }
}

What am I doing wrong?

mpora

Popular Answer

I've run the code and it displays only the Names, which is correct, because the Ages are defined using invalid HTML: <th></td> (probably a typo).

By the way, the code can be simplified to only one loop:

foreach (var cell in doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//table[@id='table2']/tr/td"))
{
    Response.Write(cell.InnerText);
}

Here's the code I used to test: http://pastebin.com/euzhUAAh

Cristian Lupascu

View more on Stack Overflow

Accepted Answer

I had to provide the full xpath. I got the full xpath by using Firebug from a suggestion by @Coda (https://stackoverflow.com/a/3104048/1238850) and I ended up with this code:

foreach (HtmlNode row in doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("/html/body/table/tbody/tr/td/table[@id='table2']/tbody/tr"))
{
    HtmlNodeCollection cells = row.SelectNodes("td");
    for (int i = 0; i < cells.Count; ++i)
    {
        if (i == 0)
        { Response.Write("Person Name : " + cells[i].InnerText + "<br>"); }
        else {
            Response.Write("Other attributes are: " + cells[i].InnerText + "<br>"); 
        }
    }
}

I am sure it can be written way better than this but it is working for me now.

Html Agility Pack loop through table rows and columns

Question

Accepted Answer

Popular Answer

Performance

Expression Evaluator