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ASP.net: How to get the content of a specific html element on server side

Answer 1

A:

Hey,

Not sure I understand 100% of the issue, but I think maybe you are trying to do a screen scrape, as described here? http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/070601-1.shtml

Otherwise, client-side HTML, because they aren't server tags, can't be read directly on the server as you well know. But, everything posted back to the server is a part of the posted data (ie. Request.Form), so you can get existing values that way.

Alternatively, could JavaScript code work, and stream the data back to the server via a web service that you want?

HTH.

Brian 2010-09-25 03:14:18

I cannot do it on client side as the data comes from a 3rd party site.What I planed is from server side if I send a http request to that site that will return the html. From that html I can extract the targeted element and the content that it carries. I think we can use the regex to extract the data. But not sure how to do that.

Rahat 2010-09-25 04:26:06

Thnx for the link.The example given on the 4guysfromrolla does something similar but it only puts the html in a label. In our case we have to scan that returned html code to get the data.

Rahat 2010-09-25 04:57:38

If its XHTML compliant, use an XML reader to read the data. Otherwise, do string parsing.

Brian 2010-09-25 05:58:28

The response was not a valid XML. so I had to do following this article: http://olussier.net/2010/03/30/easily-parse-html-documents-in-csharp/It worked perfect for me.

Rahat 2010-09-27 18:33:38

Answer 2

+1 A:

Public Function GetElements(ByVal TagName As String, ByVal ClassName As String) As List(Of XElement)
    Dim Document = XDocument.Load("http://urlofyourchoice.net/")
    Dim Elements = Document.Descendants().Where(Function(e) e.Name.LocalName = TagName AndAlso e.Attribute("class") = ClassName)

    Return Elements.ToList
End Function

Sub Usage() Handles Me.Load
    Response.Write(GetElements("div", "ContentBox").First.ToString())
End Sub

Note that this will not work if the returned response is not a valid xml document.

diamandiev 2010-09-25 05:24:22

Cany anyone translate the above code into C#?

Rahat 2010-09-27 17:03:01

The returned response is a html page.

Rahat 2010-09-27 17:17:54

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ASP.net: How to get the content of a specific html element on server side

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