Is Html Agility Pack capable of making HTTP requests?

No, Html Agility Pack itself is not capable of making HTTP requests. Html Agility Pack is a .NET library designed for parsing and manipulating HTML documents. It can load HTML content from a string, a file, or a Stream object, but it doesn't have built-in capabilities to perform HTTP requests to fetch HTML content from the web.

To make HTTP requests in a .NET environment, you typically use classes from the System.Net.Http namespace, such as HttpClient. Once you have retrieved the HTML content using an HTTP request, you can then use Html Agility Pack to parse and manipulate the HTML.

Here's an example of how you might use HttpClient together with Html Agility Pack in C#:

using System;
using System.Net.Http;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using HtmlAgilityPack;

class Program
{
    static async Task Main(string[] args)
    {
        // Create an instance of HttpClient
        using (var httpClient = new HttpClient())
        {
            // Perform an HTTP GET request to fetch the HTML content
            string url = "http://example.com";
            var response = await httpClient.GetAsync(url);
            if (response.IsSuccessStatusCode)
            {
                // Read the response content as a string
                var htmlContent = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();

                // Load the HTML content into an HtmlDocument using Html Agility Pack
                var htmlDocument = new HtmlDocument();
                htmlDocument.LoadHtml(htmlContent);

                // Now you can use Html Agility Pack to parse and manipulate the HTML document
                // For example, selecting nodes using XPath
                var nodes = htmlDocument.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//a[@href]");
                foreach (var node in nodes)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(node.GetAttributeValue("href", string.Empty));
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

In the above example:

1. An HttpClient instance is created to handle the HTTP request.
2. The GetAsync method is used to asynchronously send a GET request to the specified URL.
3. The response is checked for success, and the content is read as a string using ReadAsStringAsync.
4. An instance of HtmlDocument from Html Agility Pack is created, and the HTML string is loaded into it with LoadHtml.
5. The HTML document is then parsed using Html Agility Pack, and an XPath query is used to select all the anchor elements with an href attribute.

Remember that when using HttpClient, it is a good practice to instantiate it once and reuse it throughout the lifetime of the application, instead of creating a new instance for each request. This helps to efficiently manage sockets and network resources.