Manipulating HTML files

Question

I'm working on a browser-like application which gets HTML from a site (any website) then applies a style-script over it to change certain elements (just like greasemonkey).

My initial plan is to parse the HTML using XPath and XmlDocument, but is there a better way?

Thanks in advance!

Ps> Handy tips, tricks & links on HTML+C# would be great~ ^^

Answer 1

HTML is not always follows XML rules, for example there are tags in html, that may not have close tag, so XPath and XDocument will sometimes throw errors. IE API gives you ability to do that(see here), you can also find 3-rd party parsers for that (see this o this)

Answer 2

I would highly recomend using XSLT. This allows you to keep all your transformational data OUTSIDE your code, and therefore, making it really easy to change it if the HTML to be transformed is modified, or you want to change your layout.

Non the less, if using HTML and not XHTML, beware of possible errors. Non the less, using a Tidy library can help you overcome this.

Answer 3

use the HTML Aglility pack. You can find it here: http://www.codeplex.com/htmlagilitypack

Answer 4

I would really recommend using a package for your programming language of choice that handles all the oddities of HTML parsing. I've used Hpricot in Ruby before and it's made things a breeze.

Answer 5

If you want to be able to browse the HTML based on its content, XPath is a good choice. But you'll have to clean up the HTML first. You can use HTML tidy to convert the HTML to XHTML. In the process you might modify how the page renders. But it seems to be the purpose of your project so that's not a big deal.