Does IronWebScraper support XPath or CSS selectors?

IronWebScraper is a web scraping library for the .NET framework that is designed to simplify the process of extracting data from websites. It provides a range of features that make it easy to navigate, query, and download content from the web.

IronWebScraper supports CSS selectors, which allow developers to target specific elements within a webpage's HTML structure. CSS selectors are widely used in web development and web scraping for their simplicity and effectiveness in selecting elements based on their attributes, classes, IDs, and other characteristics.

Here is an example of how to use IronWebScraper with CSS selectors in C#:

using System;
using IronWebScraper;

public class MyScraper : WebScraper
{
    public override void Init()
    {
        this.Request("http://example.com", Parse);
    }

    public override void Parse(Response response)
    {
        foreach (var title in response.Css("h1.title"))
        {
            Console.WriteLine(title.TextContentClean);
        }
    }
}

public class Program
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        var scraper = new MyScraper();
        scraper.Start();
    }
}

In the example above, response.Css("h1.title") is using a CSS selector to find all <h1> elements with the class title on the page.

As for XPath, IronWebScraper does not natively support XPath queries out of the box. XPath is another powerful language for selecting nodes from an XML or HTML document, and it is commonly used in web scraping because of its flexibility and ability to handle complex querying scenarios.

If you need to use XPath in a .NET web scraping context, you might consider using other libraries such as HtmlAgilityPack or AngleSharp, which provide support for XPath queries. Here's a quick example of how to use HtmlAgilityPack with XPath:

using HtmlAgilityPack;
using System;
using System.Linq;

public class Program
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        var web = new HtmlWeb();
        var document = web.Load("http://example.com");

        // Using XPath to select nodes
        var nodes = document.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//h1[@class='title']");

        if (nodes != null)
        {
            foreach (var node in nodes)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(node.InnerText.Trim());
            }
        }
    }
}

In this example, document.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//h1[@class='title']") is an XPath expression used to select all <h1> elements that have a class attribute equal to title.

If you specifically need to use IronWebScraper and require XPath functionality, you could potentially extract the raw HTML using IronWebScraper and then parse and query it using another library like HtmlAgilityPack for its XPath capabilities. However, this would involve additional steps and might not be as efficient as using a library that directly supports both CSS selectors and XPath.