Simple parsing of html file for <U></U> values in .net?

Question

Looking for a simple means in .NET to parse an html file to get back all values within <u></u> tags.

Ex: <U>105F</U>

There may be many of these in the file with other tags but all I need is to loop through and get back a list of all the values so they cna then be processed.

Looking for a light small way to handle this.

Answer 1

If the HTML document is well formed, XPath would be my first choice.

Requested code example (never tested thou);

var doc                    = new XPathDocument (@"path\to\file.html");
XPathNavigator navigator   = doc.CreateNavigator ();
XPathNodeIterator iterator = navigator.Select ("//U");
while (iterator.MoveNext ())
    Console.WriteLine ("U: {0}", iterator.Current.Value);

Answer 2

Definitely Regular expressions:

Dim myPattern As String = "<U>(.*?)</U>"

    For Each thisMatch As Match In System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Matches(myPage1HTML, myPattern,RegexOptions.IgnoreCase)
            Response.write(thisMatch.ToString)
    Next

Answer 3

XmlNodeList list = doc.SelectNodes("//u");

Gets you the list of U nodes

Answer 4

sample for using Xpath with XMLDocument

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.Load("file.html");

XmlNodeList nodeList = doc.DocumentElement.SelectNodes("//u");
foreach (XmlNode title in nodeList) {
    Console.WriteLine(title.InnerXml);
}

its taken from here

Answer 5

Html Agility Pack.

I strongly advise against using regular expressions for parsing HTML. They're a great tool, but they're not suited to this job. HTML is just too complex. As soon as you hit one of the edge cases (embedded tags, nested tags, etc.) you'll see what I mean.

EDIT: See also Coding Horror: Parsing: Beyond Regex