Html Agility Pack. Load and scrape webpage

thatsIT picture thatsIT · May 11, 2012 · Viewed 38.8k times · Source

Is this the best way to get a webpage when scraping?

HttpWebRequest oReq = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
HttpWebResponse resp = (HttpWebResponse)oReq.GetResponse();

var doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();

doc.Load(resp.GetResponseStream());
var element = doc.GetElementbyId("//start-left");
var element2 = doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//body");
string html = doc.DocumentNode.OuterHtml;

I've seen HtmlWeb().Load to get a webpage. Is that a better alternative to load and the scrape the webpage?


Ok i'll try that instead.

HtmlDocument doc = web.Load(url);

Now when i got my doc and didn't get so mutch properties. No one like SelectSingleNode. The only one I can use is GetElementById, and that works but I whant to get a class.

Do I need to do it like this?

var htmlBody = doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//body");
htmlBody.SelectSingleNode("//paging");

Answer

Jacob Proffitt picture Jacob Proffitt · May 11, 2012

Much easier to use HtmlWeb.

string Url = "http://something";
HtmlWeb web = new HtmlWeb();
HtmlDocument doc = web.Load(Url);