How do I make LINQ to XML and HTML work together?

Question

I have an html table

  <table border="0" width="100%">
        <tr class="headerbg">
            <th width="5%">
                No
            </th>
            <th width="30%">
                Name
            </th>
            <th width="20%">
                Department or Division
            </th>
            <th width="25%">
                Email
            </th>
            <th width="20%">
                Staff/Student
            </th>
        </tr>
        <tr class="bg2">
            <td>
                1
            </td>
            <td>
                <strong><a class="searchLink2" href="tel_search.php?fore=Dave&amp;sur=Rumber">Dave Rumber</a></strong>
            </td>
            <td>
                Medical School
            </td>
            <td>
                <a class="searchLink2" href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>
            </td>
            <td>
                Student&nbsp;
            </td>
        </tr>
    </table>

Sometimes there will be more than one row of people results. I would like to be able to go through each row and pluck out the name and e-mail information and do some other processing. Put the data in a datagrid, and possibly into a database.

I guess my question is how do I do this?

  string table = GetContents(buffer);

  table = table.Replace(" ", "");
  table = table.Replace("&", "&");

  XElement inters = XElement.Parse(table);

I can put it into an XElement but I am not quite sure where to go from here!

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can actually use an HTML table as a data source for OLE DB:

http://connectionstrings.com/html-table

Full Disclosure: I haven't actually tried this - but I'm guessing it'll be much easier than trying to parse XML out of HTML.

Answer 2

Here's some freehand code that should get you started. Don't do this in production, this is an educational demonstration only.

List<XElement> rows = inters
  .Descendants
  .Where(x => x.Name == "tr")
  .Skip(1) //header
  .ToList();
//
// and now to turn rows into people
List<Person> people = rows
  //filter to anchor.  should be two.
  .Select(r => r.Descendants.Where(a => a.Name = "a"))
  //Project each anchor pair into a Person
  .Select(g => new Person()
  {
    Name = g.First().Value,
    Email = g.Skip(1).First().Value
  })
  .ToList();