Does Html Agility Pack support XPath 2.0?

Html Agility Pack (HAP) does not support XPath 2.0. Html Agility Pack is a popular .NET library used to parse HTML documents and it supports XPath 1.0 for navigating and selecting parts of HTML documents.

XPath 2.0 introduces a number of new features and functions not found in XPath 1.0, including additional data types, conditional expressions, and iteration constructs. However, HAP has not been updated to include XPath 2.0 features and it relies on the System.Xml namespace provided by the .NET Framework for its XPath functionality, which also does not support XPath 2.0.

If you need to use XPath 2.0 features in a .NET application, you might need to look for alternative libraries or implement the necessary functionality yourself. For typical web scraping tasks, however, XPath 1.0 as provided by Html Agility Pack is often sufficient.

Here's an example of how you could use Html Agility Pack with XPath 1.0 in C#:

using System;
using HtmlAgilityPack;

class Program
{
    static void Main()
    {
        var html = @"<html>
                        <body>
                            <div id='content'>
                                <p>First paragraph</p>
                                <p>Second paragraph</p>
                            </div>
                        </body>
                     </html>";

        var doc = new HtmlDocument();
        doc.LoadHtml(html);

        // Using XPath 1.0 to select all paragraph elements within the div with id 'content'
        var nodes = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//div[@id='content']/p");

        foreach (var node in nodes)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(node.InnerText);
        }
    }
}

This code will output:

First paragraph
Second paragraph

If you truly need XPath 2.0 features in your .NET application, you might have to look into other solutions or libraries that offer support for XPath 2.0. However, such libraries are less common and might not be as well-maintained or widely used as Html Agility Pack.

Related Questions

Get Started Now

WebScraping.AI provides rotating proxies, Chromium rendering and built-in HTML parser for web scraping
Icon