Select only items in a specific DIV using HtmlAgilityPack

Adam Haile picture Adam Haile · May 20, 2010 · Viewed 18k times · Source

I'm trying to use the HtmlAgilityPack to pull all of the links from a page that are contained within a div declared as <div class='content'> However, when I use the code below I simply get ALL links on the entire page. This doesn't really make sense to me since I am calling SelectNodes from the sub-node I selected earlier (which when viewed in the debugger only shows the HTML from that specific div). So, it's like it's going back to the very root node every time I call SelectNodes. The code I use is below:

HtmlWeb hw = new HtmlWeb();
HtmlDocument doc = hw.Load(@"http://example.com");
HtmlNode node = doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//div[@class='content']");
foreach(HtmlNode link in node.SelectNodes("//a[@href]"))
{
    Console.WriteLine(link.Value);
}

Is this the expected behavior? And if so, how do I get it to do what I'm expecting?

Answer

Kobi picture Kobi · May 20, 2010

This will work:

node.SelectNodes("a[@href]")

Also, you can do it in a single selector:

doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//div[@class='content']//a[@href]")

Also, note that link.Value isn't defined for HtmlNode, so your code doesn't compile.