Can IronWebScraper parse JSON or XML data from web pages?

IronWebScraper is a web scraping library specifically designed for the .NET environment. It is primarily used for parsing HTML content from web pages to extract data. However, IronWebScraper does not natively support parsing JSON or XML data as its main focus is on HTML. But since JSON and XML can be part of web page content or accessible through APIs, you can certainly retrieve such data with IronWebScraper and then parse it using .NET's built-in libraries such as Json.NET (Newtonsoft.Json) for JSON and System.Xml for XML.

Here's a general approach to using IronWebScraper to obtain JSON or XML data from a web page:

1. Use IronWebScraper to fetch the web page that contains the JSON or XML.
2. Extract the JSON or XML string from the fetched content.
3. Parse the JSON or XML string using the appropriate .NET library.

Below is an example demonstrating how you might use IronWebScraper along with Newtonsoft.Json to extract and parse JSON data from a web page:

using IronWebScraper;
using Newtonsoft.Json.Linq; // Make sure to include the Newtonsoft.Json NuGet package

public class JsonScraper : WebScraper
{
    public override void Init()
    {
        this.LoggingLevel = WebScraper.LogLevel.All;
        this.Request("http://example.com/api/data", ParseJson);
    }

    public void ParseJson(Response response)
    {
        // Assuming the response contains raw JSON data
        string jsonContent = response.Content;

        // Parse the JSON string into a JObject
        JObject jsonData = JObject.Parse(jsonContent);

        // Now you can extract data from the JObject
        // For example, to retrieve a value with the key 'name':
        string name = jsonData["name"].ToString();

        // Do something with the extracted data...
    }

    public override void Start()
    {
        this.StartAsync();
    }
}

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

For XML parsing, you would use the System.Xml.Linq namespace and the XDocument class:

using IronWebScraper;
using System.Xml.Linq; // Includes .NET's built-in XML handling

public class XmlScraper : WebScraper
{
    public override void Init()
    {
        this.LoggingLevel = WebScraper.LogLevel.All;
        this.Request("http://example.com/api/data.xml", ParseXml);
    }

    public void ParseXml(Response response)
    {
        // Assuming the response contains raw XML data
        string xmlContent = response.Content;

        // Parse the XML string into an XDocument
        XDocument xmlData = XDocument.Parse(xmlContent);

        // Now you can extract data using LINQ to XML
        // For example, to retrieve elements with the tag 'name':
        foreach (var element in xmlData.Descendants("name"))
        {
            string name = element.Value;
            // Do something with the extracted data...
        }
    }

    public override void Start()
    {
        this.StartAsync();
    }
}

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

In these examples, IronWebScraper is used to download the content from a given URL, and then JSON.NET and System.Xml.Linq are used to parse the JSON and XML data, respectively.

Remember that when scraping content from the web, it is important to respect the website's robots.txt rules and terms of service, as well as to manage the frequency and pattern of your requests to avoid overloading the website's servers.