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Answer 1

+5 A:

I recommend HTML Agility Pack. You'll have to handle the GUI part yourself. It doesn't require valid HTML, but creates a HtmlDocument similar to XmlDocument.

Matthew Flaschen 2010-06-10 16:26:43

That library is awesome.

Dan Tao 2010-06-10 16:38:21

Answer 2

A:

Joel Coehoorn 2010-06-10 16:29:15

Not quite. The XHTML strict standard defines additional requirements on things like what attributes are available for what tags, what tags can be placed where, etc. Unless the HTML document links to a schema and the XML parser actually uses that schema, the document only needs to be syntactically valid XML.

Sean Edwards 2010-06-10 16:34:30

This page's syntax never changes, I want to read it's content. Maybe the best solution would be RegEx?

fonix232 2010-06-10 16:42:37

@fonix232 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454

Joel Coehoorn 2010-06-10 16:57:00

@Joel Coehoorn:As I said, the syntax never changes, just the data. So this can be parsed by RegEx, if I read the file into a string. There are no changes, no additional info, nor anything when it is updated. Only those fields.

fonix232 2010-06-10 17:14:28

Answer 3

A:

Why not just do string replacement to convert the HTML table into XML:

   <table class="bidders" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">

becomes:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

and

  <tr class="bidRow4">

becomes

  <item>

and

 <td class="right">

becomes

 <field1>

etc

EDIT 1:

I think also that the DataSet Class has a:

.ReadXML

method such that you could then databind to that dataset:

    DataSet ds = new DataSet();
    ds.ReadXml("foo.xml");
    DataGrid.DataSource = ds;
    DataGrid.DataBind();

or something similar

Darknight 2010-06-10 16:37:45

I don't want to convert, as even reading a simple XML document with XMLdocument takes very long time.

fonix232 2010-06-10 16:43:43

Sounds like your trying to scrape data off a website, there is not ever going to be a fast way of doing it. You need to find another method of getting that data, what other access to you have to this data?

Darknight 2010-06-10 18:42:46

Only this HTML page, as it is rendered by an unknown script, from an unknown database, on an unknown way. So no more access, until I can hack my way around this.

fonix232 2010-06-10 20:22:19

One problem with the DataSet method - this file has child nodes. So it will cause an exception, and it can't run down sadly.

fonix232 2010-06-10 20:29:19

Sorry I'm not sure what you mean, have you actually tried this method?

Darknight 2010-06-10 21:17:15

Yes I did try it, DataGridView has no such call as DataBind().

fonix232 2010-06-11 11:05:02

What about a DataGrid? I'm 99.99999% sure it has a databind method!

Darknight 2010-06-11 13:26:40

Maybe, but DataGrid has to be added manually to the Form (writing the code by my hand) as it does not have an icon in my toolbox (maybe my VS2010 is a bi fruckled up)

fonix232 2010-06-11 14:02:40

What?!!! thats no reason not to use a control :) are you mad! :) i kid.anyway you can reset your toolbox here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1268298/how-to-rebuild-the-visual-studio-toolbox

Darknight 2010-06-11 14:19:52

Answer 4

A:

I normally use Fast XPath Reader in combination with LinqToXML for the job. It is rather old (2007) though.

I wasn't aware of the HTML Agility Pack, so I can't say how it compares (in both performance and ease of use).

Christina Mayers 2010-06-10 16:38:13

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C# - Parse HTML source as XML

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