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XLinq to Web

HTML => XML + CSS with XLinq 🤘

Read HTML as XML and query it with CSS over XLinq (or HtmlAgilityPack killer 😉).

No need to learn an entirely new object model for a page 🤘. This makes it the most productive and lean library for web scraping using the latest and greatest that .NET can offer.

Usage

using System.Xml.Linq;
using Devlooped.Web;

XDocument page = HtmlDocument.Load("page.html")
IEnumerable<XElement> elements = page.CssSelectElements("div.menuitem");

XElement title = page.CssSelectElement("html head meta[name=title]");

By default, HtmlDocument.Load will skip non-content elements script and style, turn all element names into lower case, and ignore all XML namespaces (useful when loading XHTML, for example) for easier querying. These options as well as granular whitespace handling can be configured using the overloads receiving an HtmlReaderSettings.

The underlying parsing is performed by the amazing SgmlReader library by Microsoft’s Chris Lovett.

In addition, the following extension methods make it easier to work with XML documents where you want to query with CSS or XPath without having to deal with XML namespaces:

using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using Devlooped.Web;

var doc = XDocument.Load("doc.xml")
// Will remove all xmlns declarations, and allow querying elements 
// as if none had namespaces, returns the root element
XElement nons = doc.RemoveNamespaces();

// Alternatively, you can also ignore at the XmlReader level
using var reader = XmlReader.Create("doc.xml").IgnoreNamespaces();
doc = XDocument.Load(reader);

// Finally, you can also skip elements at the reader level
using var reader = XmlReader.Create("doc.xml").SkipElements("foo", "bar");
doc = XDocument.Load(reader);

CSS

At the moment, supports the following CSS selector features:

And all combinators

Non-CSS features:

text() pseudo-attribute selector: selects the node text contents, as specified in the XPath text() location path. Can be used instead of an attribute name selector, such as div[text()=foo]. All attribute value selectors are also supported:
- [text()=val]: Represents an element whose text contents is exactly “val”.
- [text()~=val]: Represents an element whose text contents is a whitespace-separated list of words, one of which is exactly “val”. If “val” contains whitespace, it will never represent anything (since the words are separated by spaces). Also if “val” is the empty string, it will never represent anything.
- [text()|=val]: Represents an element whose text contents either being exactly “val” or beginning with “val” immediately followed by “-“ (U+002D).
- [text()^=val]: Represents an element whose text contents begins with the prefix “val”. If “val” is the empty string then the selector does not represent anything.
- [text()$=val]: Represents an element whose text contents ends with the suffix “val”. If “val” is the empty string then the selector does not represent anything.
- [text()*=val]: Represents an element whose text contents contains at least one instance of the substring “val”. If “val” is the empty string then the selector does not represent anything.