A Regex builder for CSS queries

Question

I've got a problem I need solved using Regex expressions; it involves taking a CSS selector and compiling a regex that matches the string representation of the nodes inside an HTML document. The point is to avoid parsing the HTML as XML and then either making Xpath or DOM queries to apply style attributes.

Does anyone know of a project that already implements something like this in any language? The target platform would be .NET 3.5.

Answer 1

Regular expressions seem like an amazingly bad way of matching those nodes. I'm not sure I follow your problem - why not just use something like jquery to pick out those nodes? eg given a css selector 'div>span.red:first-child',

$('div>span.red:first-child')

would return an array of those matching nodes.

EDIT: Oh, wait - are you trying to do this 'offline', as it were - not in a user's browser? Yeah, ignore my advice. (Even so, I'd still suggest that regular expressions aren't going to help you. Why are you against generating an xml-document representation of the page?)

Answer 2

Why would you want to avoid parsing the DOM of a language that is designed to be parsed as a DOM?

Answer 3

Html Agility Pack