We are moving an e-commerce website to a new platform and because all of their pages are static html and they do not have all their product information in a database, we must scrape their current website for the product descriptions.
Here is one of the pages: http://www.cabinplace.com/accrugsbathblackbear.htm
What is the best was to get the description into a string? Should I use html agility pack? and if so how would this be done? as I am new to html agility pack and xhtml in general.
Thanks
The HTML Agility Pack is a good library to use for this kind of work.
You did not indicate if all of the content is structured this way nor if you have already gotten the kind of fragment you posted from the HTML files, so it is difficult to advise further.
In general, if all pages are structured similarly, I would use an XPath expression to extract the paragraph and pick the innerHtml or innerText from each page.
Something like the following:
var description = htmlDoc.SelectNodes("p[#class='content_txt']")[0].innerText;
Also,
If you need a good tool for testing or finding the Xpath for the HAP you can use this one:
HTML-Agility-xpath-finder. It is made using the same library so if you find a xpath in this tool you be securely able to use in your code.
Related
Been struggling with this for awhile. I can't seem to figure out how to get a regex request to only return the value attribute of a particular html tag. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Are you trying to parse HTML with Regex? Don't or you will continue to struggle. Use SgmlReader or HTML Agility Pack for this purpose.
RegEx is not a good solution for parsing unstructured (or unknown) HTML.
See this SO post for compelling reasons why this is the case.
I suggest using a parser such as the HTML Agility Pack and querying the parsed document.
This is just a general question. Currently I am doing webpage scraping using regex. But I think it is sometimes too difficult to figure out the regular expression, so I am thinking is XSL/XPath an alternative to regex in C#?
Also, I would like to know if there are more advanced techniques for webpage scraping other than the two listed above. Thanks.
You may take a look at SgmlReader or Html Agility Pack which are HTML parsing libraries for .NET.
Easy way to gather data from a web page is WebsiteParser. It's based on Html Agility Pack and you can simply describe your properties using attributes and CSS selectors.
Github here
It seems to me just using the html agility pack would work to prevent xss (parse then get innertext). Would it be repetitive to use antixss after using hap?
Thanks,
rod.
Apples and oranges.
The HTML Agility Pack is a tool to parse HTML and work with the resulting parsed document.
the AntiXSSLibrary is a tool to use on your HTML and website to prevent XSS.
Comparing the two does not make much sense to me.
Basically I want to extract keywords or words or tokens that are present in the webpage after removing the stopwords. Does anybody know how to do this? Code in C# would be appreciated.
Use an HTML parsing library like the HTML Agility Pack.
Once you load an HTML document with it, you can query it with Xpath syntax - it exposes the HTML in a similar way to an XmlDocument.
The HTML Agility Pack that Oded mentions will help you get at the plain text inside the HTML, but to extract keywords from the webpage after removing the stopwords you'll need to do more work. There's a good informative answer from Joseph Turian to this question: How do I extract keywords used in text?
I want to store Google search results (both title and link) into database. HTML code of search results is like:
<br/>
THETITLE
And each page has 10 results. Can anyone show me how to retrieve THEURL and THETITLE?
Thank you so much!
You should to give Html Agility Pack a try. An HTML parser is correct way to read HTML content, not regular expressions.
BUT, If you wanna try for your own risk:
<h3 class=r><a .*? href="(?<url>[^"]*)".*?>(?<title>.*?)</a></h3>
You'll have problems with:
Line breaks
Unmatched tags
Minor HTML changes
So, good luck!
For starters, I would not recommend using regex for this, use the 'Html Agility Pack' to do the parsing of the HTML document.
Hope this helps,
Best regards,
Tom.
Consider using the Google AJAX Search API instead. It will be easier on both you and Google's servers. There are some instructions for using it outside JavaScript environments. They don't give a C# example, but it shouldn't be difficult to adapt to your needs using one of the JSON APIs for C#.
If you do stick with HTML, I also recommend HTML Agility Pack.
You should also think about caching so you minimize both stale data and unnecessary requests.