Can I use regular expressions with IronWebScraper?

IronWebScraper is a C# library designed for web scraping, and it does support the use of regular expressions (regex) for parsing HTML content. Regular expressions are a powerful tool for text processing that can be used to search, match, and extract data from strings based on patterns.

When using IronWebScraper, you can apply regular expressions to the HTML content that you retrieve to extract specific pieces of data. Here's an example of how you might use regular expressions within the context of IronWebScraper in C#:

using IronWebScraper;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

public class RegexScraper : WebScraper
{
    public override void Init()
    {
        // Start scraping from this URL
        this.Request("https://example.com", Parse);
    }

    public override void Parse(Response response)
    {
        // Use a regular expression to find all instances of a specific pattern
        // For example, extracting email addresses from the page content
        string pattern = @"\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,}\b";
        Regex regex = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
        MatchCollection matches = regex.Matches(response.Content);

        foreach (Match match in matches)
        {
            // Do something with each match
            // For example, you could add them to a list or write them to a file
            Console.WriteLine(match.Value);
        }

        // Continue scraping other pages if necessary
        // For example, by following links
        // this.Request(response.AbsoluteLinks, Parse);
    }
}

public class Program
{
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        var scraper = new RegexScraper();
        scraper.Start(); // Start scraping
    }
}

In this example, the RegexScraper class extends WebScraper and overrides the Init and Parse methods. The Init method sets the initial URL to scrape, and the Parse method is called to process the response from each request.

A regular expression is used to match email addresses in the content of the page. The Regex class from the System.Text.RegularExpressions namespace is used to compile the pattern, and the Matches method is used to find all instances of the pattern in the HTML content.

Remember to use regular expressions responsibly and efficiently, as complex regex patterns can be computationally expensive and slow down your scraping process. Also, be aware of the legal and ethical implications of web scraping and ensure that you have permission to scrape the data and that you comply with the website's terms of service and robots.txt file.