How can I manipulate the DOM from a string of HTML in C#?

Question

For the moment the best way that I have found to be able to manipulate DOM from a string that contain HTML is:

WebBrowser webControl = new WebBrowser();
webControl.DocumentText = html;
HtmlDocument doc = webControl.Document;

There are two problems:

1. Requires the WebBrowser object!
2. This can't be used with multiple threads; I need something that would work on different thread (other than the main thread).

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Depending on what you are trying to do (maybe you can give us more details?) and depending on whether or not the HTML is well-formed, you could convert this to an XmlDocument:

System.Xml.XmlDocument x = new System.Xml.XmlDocument();
x.LoadXml(html); // as long as html is well-formed, i.e. XHTML

Then you could manipulate it easily, without the WebBrowser instance. As for threads, I don't know enough about the implementation of XmlDocument to know the answer to that part.

---

If the document isn't in proper form, you could use NTidy (.NET wrapper for HTML Tidy) to get it in shape first; I had to do this very thing for a project once and it really wasn't too bad.

Answer 2

I did a search to GooglePlex for HTML and I found Html Agility Pack I do not know if it's for that or not, I am downloading it right now to give a try.

Answer 3

JasonBunting already posted this, but it really works to use a .net wrapper around HTML tidy and load it up in an XmlDocument.

I have used this .net wrapper before :

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/ZetaHtmlTidy.aspx

And implemented it somewhat like this:

string input = "<p>crappy html<br <img src=foo></div>";
HtmlTidy tidy = new HtmlTidy()
string output = tidy.CleanHtml(input, HtmlTidyOptions.ConvertToXhtml);
XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.LoadXml(output);

Sorry if considered a repost :)