Any suggestions in a way to parse headers and links from blog pages using C#?

Question

I'm currently self-studying C# in my free time and thought of a "little" project to get me going (and one that I or others will actually find useful). It ended up being more complicated than I thought. Or maybe I'm just thinking it is?

Anyway, this project would parse the homepages of the blogs (most of them are Wordpress blogs) I frequent to, take the post headers and the links within those posts and notify me via a balloon tip in the task bar. I can handle the rest except for the way of getting C# to parse the HTML pages for the items I need. C# doesn't seem to have any built-in way to do this. Could anyone point me to the right direction? I just looked into the HTML Agility Pack but I'm still trying to figure it out. Some example code will help much too. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You are doing the right thing if you are using the HTML Agility Pack.

Here is selecting all of the links on a page (from here):

HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.Load("file.htm");
foreach(HtmlNode link in doc.DocumentElement.SelectNodes("//a[@href"])
{
   HtmlAttribute att = link["href"];
   att.Value = FixLink(att);
}
doc.Save("file.htm");

You may want to brush up on your XPath, if you want to learn how to query the HtmlDocument.