HtmlAgilityPack and HtmlDecode

html-agility-pack
Thomas picture Thomas · Jul 12, 2011 · Viewed 20.9k times · Source

I am currently using HtmlAgilityPack with a console application to scrape a website. Since the html is encoded (it returns encoded characters like ') I have to decode before I save the content to my database.

Is there a way to decode the returned html using HtmlAgilityPack without having to use HttpUtility.HtmlDecode? I want to avoid adding System.Web to my console application if possible.

Answer

Simon Mourier picture Simon Mourier · Jul 14, 2011

The Html Agility Pack is equiped with a utility class called HtmlEntity. It has a static method with the following signature:

/// <summary>
/// Replace known entities by characters.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="text">The source text.</param>
/// <returns>The result text.</returns>
public static string DeEntitize(string text)

It supports well-known entities (like &nbsp;) and encoded characters such as &#039; as well.

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