What is the best way to search through HTML in a C# string for specific text and mark the text?

Question

What would be the best way to search through HTML inside a C# string variable to find a specific word/phrase and mark (or wrap) that word/phrase with a highlight?

Thanks,

Jeff

Answer 1

I like using Html Agility Pack very easy to use, although there hasn't been much updates lately, it is still usable. For example grabbing all the links

HtmlWeb client = new HtmlWeb();
HtmlDocument doc = client.Load("http://yoururl.com");            
HtmlNodeCollection Nodes = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//a[@href]");         

foreach (var link in Nodes)
{                
    Console.WriteLine(link.Attributes["href"].Value);
}

Answer 2

Regular Expression would be my way. ;)

Answer 3

If the HTML you're using XHTML compliant, you could load it as an XML document, and then use XPath/XSL - long winded but kind of elegant?

An approach I used in the past is to use HTMLTidy to convert messy HTML to XHTML, and then use XSL/XPath for screen scraping content into a database, to create a reverse content management system.

Regular expressions would do it, but could be complicated once you try stripping out tags, image names etc, to remove false positives.