Get Inner text between two tags and get the output into two labels - VB.NET - HtmlAgilityPack

Question

Get Inner text between two tags and get the output into two labels - VB.NET - HtmlAgilityPack

html html-agility-pack innertext vb.net

Question

I tried to search for examples and much but nothing seems to work. so i'm using HtmlAgilityPack and I want to get the inner text between two specific tags.

Example:

<br>Terms of Service<br></br>Developers<br>

I want to get the innertext where first <br> and <br> into label1 and the second </br> and <br> into label2

which will be like

Label1.text = "Terms of Service"
Label2.text = "Developers"

How do i achieve/do/get this? P.s; I'm not so familiar with HtmlAgilityPack, a code showing how to do this will do better. :-)

Thanks

Jeff

Popular Answer

The short answer is that HAP is not well suited to accomplish your task. My notes below:

Imports HtmlAgilityPack

Public Class Form1
    Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
        Dim mystring As String = "<BR>Terms of Service<BR></BR>Developers<BR>"
        Dim myDoc As HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument = New HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument
        myDoc.LoadHtml(mystring)
        ' here we notice HAP immediately discards the junk tag </br>
        MsgBox(myDoc.DocumentNode.OuterHtml)

        ' Below we notice that HAP did not close the BR tag because it only 
        ' attempts to close 
        ' certain nested tags associated with tables ( th, tr, td) and lists 
        ' ( li ). 
        ' if this was a supported tag that HAP could fix, the fixed output 
        ' would be as follows: 
        ' <br>Terms of Service<br></br>Developers<br></br></br>
        ' this string would be parsed as if the last tag closes the first 
        ' and each set of 
        ' inner tags close themselves without any text between them. 
        ' This means even if you changed BR to TD, or some other tag HAP 
        ' fixes nesting on, it 
        ' still would not help to parse this correctly.  
        ' Also HAP does not appear to support XHTML in this .net 2.0 version.  

        myDoc.OptionFixNestedTags = True
        MsgBox(myDoc.DocumentNode.OuterHtml)

        ' here we put the BR tag into a collection.  as it iterates through 
        ' the tags we notice there is no inner text on the BR tag, presumably 
        ' because of two reasons.  
        ' 1. HAP will not close a BR.  
        ' 2. It does not fix your broken nested tags as you expect or required.  

        Dim myBR As HtmlNodeCollection = myDoc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//BR")
        If Not myBR Is Nothing Then
            For Each br In myBR
                MsgBox(br.InnerText)
            Next
        End If
    End Sub

End Class

user2990854

View more on Stack Overflow

Accepted Answer

this is a bit dirty, but should work.

Imports System.Text.RegularExpressions

  Dim mystring As String = "<br>Terms of Service<br></br>Developers<br>"

    Dim pattern1 As String = "(?<=<br>)(.*?)(?=<br>)"
    Dim pattern2 As String = "(?<=</br>)(.*)(?=<br>)"

    Dim m1 As MatchCollection = Regex.Matches(mystring, pattern1)
    Dim m2 As MatchCollection = Regex.Matches(mystring, pattern2)
    MsgBox(m1(0).ToString)
    MsgBox(m2(0).ToString)

Get Inner text between two tags and get the output into two labels - VB.NET - HtmlAgilityPack

Question

Accepted Answer

Popular Answer

Performance

Expression Evaluator