Alternatives to HtmlAgilityPack?

Question

HtmlAgilityPack kind of sucks IMO. They made some really wonky design decisions.

• When using SelectNodes, if no nodes are found, it returns null rather than an empty set, so you can't just foreach over it without a null check.
• When trying to select children with node.SelectNodes it actually searches from the document root (which I thought was discarded -- why is the node carrying more info than it should?) unless you use descendant:: which is not obvious nor expected behavior at all, IMO.
• HtmlDocument.Load doesn't return the root node, which is what you'd want 99% of the time, I think

You might disagree with that of course, but that's not the point. I'm looking for something different. Something that behaves a little more sane, or something that uses jQuery syntax would be even better. Suggestions?

Answer 1

For the examples you've given, it should be fairly easy to alter the behaviour to that which you desire. Since HtmlAgilityPack is open source, have you considered taking a local fork and making those changes?

Answer 2

If you're just parsing the html, another option might be SgmlReader. If you're modifying the html, not so much. Don't recall how it behaves with respect to the issues you raised,but it worth checking out.

Answer 3

Started project called SharpQuery

Currently supports ID, class, tag, and attribute selectors.

a
a[href]
a[href^=http://stackoverflow.com]
.class
#id