Find text in web page

Question

Hello, I need to create app that can find text in web page like "summer" and put in string. Can someone please tell me how can I do that ? Maybe some samples please. Best regards.

Zoran Horvat · Answer

After this stage you can use some free library if you like to convert HTML into DOM. For example, here is one library available: http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/ After that you would simply have to iterate through the object model of the HTML page downloaded and to extract raw text, i.e. to strip off all formatting contained in the HTML. Zoran

Zoran Horvat · Answer

Here is the source code which opens a page from Google: using System.Net; using System; using System.IO; namespace ExceptionTest { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { try { HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create("http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1680&bih=917&q=search+something&oq=search+something&aq=f&aqi=g7g-v3&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=2820l4595l0l4723l16l11l0l3l3l1l231l1188l2.4.2l8l0"); HttpWebResponse resp = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse(); string html = null; if (resp.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK) { using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(resp.GetResponseStream())) html = reader.ReadToEnd(); } Console.WriteLine(html); } catch (System.Exception ex) { Console.WriteLine(ex.Message); } Console.WriteLine("Press ENTER to continue..."); Console.ReadLine(); } } } After reading the response, string variable html contains raw HTML contents of the page downloaded. Then you can parse it and read its content to find the string. Zoran

Zoran Horvat · Answer

Then you can use HttpWebRequest to download the page. Then you may code a simple HTML parser which finds paragraphs and other textual elements (TD, for example) so that you can extract plain text from the page. Then find string required. I've coded such applications couple of times with different requirements, it's not a big deal. Zoran

Sam Hobbs · Answer

Note that I would do it in a very different way. First, see my Introduction to Web Site Scraping . That uses a WebBrowser control. Alternatively you can use the InternetExplorer class. First you would add a handler for the DocumentComplete event. Then navigate to a web page. Then you have two or more options. The most likely option would be to create an IHTMLTxtRange and then use the findText function. If you do that, then you would be using the same thing that IE uses to find text in a page. Alternatively, you could iterate through the text nodes. Since you have already chosen Zoran's solution I won't dwell on the details of any of that. Note however that as an editor of articles in this web site, I have written tools to help me and one of the tools uses IHTMLTxtRange to find and replace text in articles. So I know it is possible. IE 9 has a new way to iterate text nodes and I spent time trying to get it to work. No one knows why it does not work, but it is possible to use the same solutions that were used before IE 9.

Janis Peksa · Answer

Cool thank you very much :)

Janis Peksa · Answer

Can someone give me sample ? I just google it but nothing good there :(

Janis Peksa · Answer

Okey, thanks I will look at the HttpWebRequest.

Janis Peksa · Answer

I'm not writing web page. If I do that I just writed on PHP. But I need app in C# on win platform. So I think that I need to download page and search it or some kind other way. Don't know how to do that. Can someone tell ? Sample be very good for me.

Zoran Horvat · Answer

Are you writing a web page within which you should find the text or you're writing a grabber which downloads HTML and searches for text within it? Zoran

Find text in web page

Answers (9)