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:
- An
HttpClient
instance is created to handle the HTTP request. - The
GetAsync
method is used to asynchronously send a GET request to the specified URL. - The response is checked for success, and the content is read as a string using
ReadAsStringAsync
. - An instance of
HtmlDocument
from Html Agility Pack is created, and the HTML string is loaded into it withLoadHtml
. - 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.