Get the value of an HTML element

Question

I have the HTML code of a webpage in a text file. I'd like my program to return the value that is in a tag. E.g. I want to get "Julius" out of

<span class="hidden first">Julius</span>

Do I need regular expression for this? Otherwise what is a string function that can do it?

Answer 1

You should be using an html parser like htmlagilitypack .Regex is not a good choice for parsing HTML files as HTML is not strict nor is it regular with its format.

You can use below code to retrieve it using HtmlAgilityPack

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

var itemList = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//span[@class='hidden first']")//this xpath selects all span tag having its class as hidden first
                  .Select(p => p.InnerText)
                  .ToList();

//itemList now contain all the span tags content having its class as hidden first