How do I get the innertext of any class by giving the xpath using C#

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<p>Have you tried this?</p>
<pre><code>//myparent/mychild[text() = 'foo']
</code>

Alternatively, you can use the shortcut for the self axis:

<code>//myparent/mychild[. = 'foo']</code>

Here i need to get the text "//myparent/mychild[text() = 'foo']"

What I have tried:

C#

string htmlCode = "";
using (WebClient client = new WebClient())
{
    client.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.UserAgent, "AvoidError");
    //htmlCode = client.DownloadString("http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_blocks.asp");
    htmlCode = client.DownloadString("http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1998681/xpath-selection-by-innertext");
}
            
HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(htmlCode);

//HtmlNode node = doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode(textBox2.Text).InnerText.ToString();
var val = doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode(textBox2.Text).InnerText.ToString();
MessageBox.Show(val.ToString());

I would paste the XPath value in TextBox2, which should inspite give my the inner text corresponding to the XPath.

C#

Xpath = //*[@id="answer-1998690"]/table/tbody/tr[1]/td[2]/div/pre[1]/code/span

The web site which i have tried to get the innertext is as follows:
xml - XPath selection by innertext - Stack Overflow[^]

I am a newbie to XPath, hence not aware on using the same much efficiently....

Posted 5-Jun-16 22:37pm

Mohideenmeera

Updated 6-Jun-16 5:09am

George Jonsson

v3

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-06T05:09:00

First of all, inner text if a property of an HTML element (instance), not a class. However, you can classify elements by CSS classes, which is routinely done in JavaScript.

But you need to do it in C# which you use to download HTML. Of course you can do it, you just need to parse HTML downloaded. Perhaps the most suitable tool is the open-source HTML Agility Pack, which can do exactly what you want: XPath. Please see:
HTML Agility Pack — Home.

See also:
Web scraping — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,
Comparison of HTML parsers — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

See also ScrapySharp, a Web scraping tool which contains a Web client used to simulate a browser and an extension of HTML Agility Pack: https://www.nuget.org/packages/ScrapySharp.

Note that you can use HTML Agility Pack or ScrapySharp for direct downloading of the resources from the Web, so you won't really need to use the class WebClient. However, it's good to know that WebClient is a pretty much rudimentary tool; a really comprehensive facility for retrieving resources from the Web (Web scraping, and stuff like that) is the class System.Net.HttpWebRequest:
HttpWebRequest Class (System.Net).

—SA