Web Scraping, also known as web crawling, web harvesting, or data scraping, is used for extracting data from websites. A web scraper uses different data selectors like CSS selectors, XPath, or both of these in order to extract data from the web pages. Both of these selectors are efficient for collecting and analyzing information from the web. This article covers how to create a web scraper in C#, specifically the information about HTML navigation, XPath Query and CSS Selector.
- C# Web Scraping Library
- Create a Web Scraper in C#
- Use XPath Query to Create Web Scraper in C#
- Use CSS Selector for Web Scraping in C#
C# Web Scraping Library
Aspose.HTML for .NET is a web scraping library that can easily be configured by downloading the reference DLL files from the New Releases section, or running the following NuGet installation command:
PM> Install-Package Aspose.Html
Create a Web Scraper in C#
You can use different properties of the Node class to navigate the HTML documents. The code snippet below explains how to navigate an HTML webpage in C#:
Inspecting HTML with Web Scraper in C#
The API also provides the generalized usage of element traversal features. The following code snippet demonstrates how to perform a detailed inspection of different elements of the API.
Custom Filter Usage for Web Scraper in C#
You can implement a custom filter using a ITreeWalker or a INodeIterator interface object along with a custom filter implementation. The following code snippet explains how to follow the process:
After implementing a custom filter, you can quickly navigate a webpage with the following code:
Use XPath Query to Create Web Scraper in C#
XPath can be used to extract data from HTML documents. The following code snippet elaborates how to use XPath Query for Web scraping in C#:
Use CSS Selector for Web Scraping in C#
You can create a search pattern to match elements in a document tree based on CSS Selectors syntax. The code snippet below explains how to perform web scraping with CSS Selector in C#:
Get Free License
You may request a free temporary license to evaluate the API in its full capacity.
Conclusion
In this article, you have learned about the C# web scraping library, Aspose.HTML for .NET, which includes several methods to create a web scraper in C#. It discusses HTML Navigation, XPath Query, as well as CSS selector methods to achieve your requirements. However, in case you need to discuss any of your concerns or questions, please write to us at forum.