Should be able to use wfd-id as the ID. I've not tried it. Long long time since I scraped with the WBC.
Well that was a silly suggestion. I wasn't sure if get element by id was strict on actually wanting an actual
ID="myid". Anyway...
Assume for example sake the html is :
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<span>I like TextB</span>
<table border="0">
<tr>
<td>
<span data-toggle="tooltip" data-placement="top" title="Click To Copy" wfd-id="130">TextA</span>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<span data-toggle="tooltip" data-placement="top" title="Click To Copy" wfd-id="135">TextB</span>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<span data-toggle="tooltip" data-placement="top" title="Click To Copy" wfd-id="135">TextB</span>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
And some sample C# code :
HtmlElementCollection htmlElementCollection = webBrowser1.Document.GetElementsByTagName("span");
if (htmlElementCollection != null)
{
foreach (HtmlElement obj in htmlElementCollection)
{
if (obj.InnerText.Contains("TextB"))
{
}
}
}
Checking only the inner text isn't very helpful if the same phrase is listed partially more than once on the page. So If this was the case, you'd end up with more than one entry meeting your conditional logic. So I can understand why people prefer to get a specific element by tag or ID instead of just reading the inner text.
This is why its important to have the correct html code, and if the html of the website you are scraping is your own, you really should add an actual
ID="myid" to your source code as already suggested; then you can get the element by ID, as I've shown above.
But what if you don't have access to the html source code to change it? Then you need to go through alternative routes, just as you are. This example will do what you need :
private void webBrowser1_DocumentCompleted(object sender, WebBrowserDocumentCompletedEventArgs e)
{
string match = IsAMatch();
if (match != null)
{
/* Do something with value */
}
}
private string IsAMatch()
{
foreach (HtmlElement html_Obj in webBrowser1.Document.GetElementsByTagName("span"))
{
if (html_Obj.GetAttribute("wfd-id").Contains("135"))
{
return html_Obj.InnerText;
}
}
return null;
}
If you wanted to go the manual ciphering route of the obj.OuterHtml which will give you :
"<SPAN title=\"Click To Copy\" wfd-id=\"135\" data-placement=\"top\" data-toggle=\"tooltip\">TextB</SPAN>"
First check the outerHtml contains
wfd-id=\"135\", then you can use substring, skip, indexof to cut the outer html off at the closing span tag. Then using indexof
>. Then substring with indexof for the first index of
< using skip on the first opening bracket of
< which will give you your text value.
This is obviously easier if using something like the html agility pack linked by Skydiver.
