Replace a single node with multiple nodes using HTML Agility Pack

Question

I have some input tags that are placeholders that I am replacing with some HTML. A lot of the time the HTML I'm replacing them with is only one tag, which is easy enough:

HtmlNode node = HtmlNode.CreateNode(sReplacementString);
inputNode.ParentNode.ReplaceChild(node, inputNode);

However if I want to replace inputNode with two or more nodes HtmlNode.CreateNode(sReplacementString) only reads the first node. Is there a way to do a replace where sReplacementString is multiple tags?

Answer 1

As far as I know, there is no direct way to do it. HtmlNode.CreateNode method creates a single node from the HTML snippet, if there are several nodes there, the first one is created only.

As a workaround you could create a temporary node, create its child nodes from the sReplacementString, and then append these child nodes right after the inputNode node, and, finally, remove the inputNode.

var temp = doc.CreateElement("temp");
temp.InnerHtml = sReplacementString;
var current = inputNode;
foreach (var child in temp.ChildNodes)
{
    inputNode.ParentNode.InsertAfter(child, current);
    current = child;
}
inputNode.Remove();