Yes, the Html Agility Pack (HAP) is free to use. It is an open-source .NET library designed to parse, navigate, and manipulate HTML documents easily. The Html Agility Pack is released under the MIT License, which is a permissive free software license. This means that you can use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the software, provided that you include the appropriate copyright notices and permissions.
The MIT License is one of the most liberal licenses available, which makes HAP suitable for use in both free and commercial applications without the requirement to disclose the source code of the application using it.
To use the Html Agility Pack in a .NET project, you can install it via NuGet. Here's the NuGet Package Manager Console command to install it:
Install-Package HtmlAgilityPack
Alternatively, you can use the .NET Core CLI to install it:
dotnet add package HtmlAgilityPack
Here's a simple example of how to use Html Agility Pack in a C# application to load an HTML document and select nodes using XPath:
using HtmlAgilityPack;
using System;
using System.Linq;
class Program
{
static void Main()
{
var html = @"<html>
<head>
<title>Sample Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id='content'>
<p>First paragraph.</p>
<p>Second paragraph.</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>";
HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(html);
// Select the div with the id 'content'
HtmlNode contentDiv = doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//div[@id='content']");
// Iterate through all paragraph nodes within the div
foreach (HtmlNode paragraph in contentDiv.SelectNodes("./p"))
{
Console.WriteLine(paragraph.InnerText);
}
}
}
When you run this code, it will output the text content of each paragraph inside the div with the id "content".
Keep in mind that the Html Agility Pack is specifically designed for the .NET environment, so if you are looking for a similar library for use with JavaScript, you might consider options such as Cheerio for Node.js or the native DOM parsing capabilities in the browser.
