C# Regex extract content of a div

Question

I've seen some related questions of mine, and I tried them but they don't work. I want to match the content from a div with the id "thumbs". But the regex.Success returns false :(

Match regex = Regex.Match(html, @"<div[^>]*id=""thumbs"">(.+?)</div>");

Answer 1

Regex is not a good choice for parsing HTML files..

HTML is not strict nor is it regular with its format..

Use htmlagilitypack

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Why use parser?

Consider your regex..There are infinite number of cases where you could break your code

• Your regex won't work if there are nested divs
• Some divs dont have an ending tag!(except XHTML)

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You can use this code to retrieve it using HtmlAgilityPack

HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.Load(yourStream);

var itemList = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//div[@id='thumbs']")//this xpath selects all div with thubs id
                  .Select(p => p.InnerText)
                  .ToList();

//itemList now contain all the div tags content having its id as thumbs