String to HtmlDocument

Question

I'm fetching the html document by URL using WebClient.DownloadString(url) but then its very hard to find the element content that I'm looking for. Whilst reading around I've spotted HtmlDocument and that it has neat things like GetElementById. How can I populate an HtmlDocument with the html returned by url?

Answer 1

The HtmlDocument class is a wrapper around the native IHtmlDocument2 COM interface.
You cannot easily create it from a string.

You should use the HTML Agility Pack.

Answer 2

Using Html Agility Pack as suggested by SLaks, this becomes very easy:

string html = webClient.DownloadString(url);
var doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(html);

HtmlNode specificNode = doc.GetElementById("nodeId");
HtmlNodeCollection nodesMatchingXPath = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("x/path/nodes");

Answer 3

To answer the original question:

HTMLDocument doc = new HTMLDocument();
IHTMLDocument2 doc2 = (IHTMLDocument2)doc;
doc2.write(fileText);
// now use doc

Then to convert back to a string:

doc.documentElement.outerHTML;