Parse part of text which is html-like table in c#

Question

I have a free text which might contains html-like definition of table, for example:

This is free text..... More free text... table start *row start*

cell 1 content# #cell 2 content

cell 3 content

row end*table end* More free text which might contain more tables definitions.

I'm looking for the best way to parse tables from such text in C#. I've read that regular expressions are not good for such text. Can any one help with this matter?

Thanks in advance.

stackoverflow.com/questions/6063203/parsing-html-with-c-net This could help u — Preben Huybrechts
– Preben Huybrechts, Commented Jul 11, 2012 at 6:57
Thanks, but my text is not html. It is free text which might contains table definition that has html structure, but with different tags. So I cannot use HTMLAgilityPack. — mayap
– mayap, Commented Jul 11, 2012 at 7:17

Ivan Golović · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-11 07:04:07Z

2

You can try it like this:

        string input = @"free text ... 
        <table><tr><td>
            <table><tr><td>test</td></tr></table>
        </td></tr></table> 
        more free text";
        string inputWithRoot = String.Format("<root>{0}</root>", input);

        XElement el = XElement.Parse(inputWithRoot);
        var tables = el.Descendants("table");

        foreach (XElement table in tables)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(table.ToString());
            Console.WriteLine();
        }

answered Jul 11, 2012 at 7:04

Ivan Golović

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1 Comment

mayap Over a year ago

The tags that define the table can be something like: <tableStart><rowStart><cellStart>some value<cellEnd><rowEnd><tableEnd>. The start and end tags are not necessarily the same. So I don't think it will work, though the solution is quite nice.

HatSoft · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-11 07:00:53Z

0

Once you have extracted the table in to a string

Please use Server.HtmlEncode to encode text that have html in it

answered Jul 11, 2012 at 7:00

HatSoft

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