How to remove empty html nodes with HtmlAgilityPack?

Question

I'm trying to remove empty html nodes with HtmlAgilityPack. I want to remove all nodes like this:

<p><span>&nbsp;</span></p>

Here's what I'm trying but it's not working:

    static string RemoveEmptyParagraphs(string html)
    {
        HtmlDocument document = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();
        document.LoadHtml(html);
        foreach (HtmlNode eachNode in document.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//p/span/text() = '&nbsp;'"))
            eachNode.Remove();
        html = document.DocumentNode.OuterHtml;
        return html;
    }

Two things. First, if you want to delete any nodes, you can't use foreach but rather a backward for loop, because that is the only proper way to delete items from a list. Second, try changing the XPath string to "//p/span[text() = ' ']" or "//p/span[contains(text() = ' ')]" if you expect any spaces to appear in source HTML. — LightBulb
– LightBulb, Commented Mar 25, 2015 at 10:56
Thanks LightBulb, my xpath was a mess, that corrected the xpath. — bearaman
– bearaman, Commented Mar 25, 2015 at 15:20

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:50:50Z

2

Before loading the html with document.LoadHtml(html); you can do this:

document.LoadHtml(html.Replace("<p><span>&nbsp;</span></p>", ""));

Or have a look at this:

static void RemoveEmptyNodes(HtmlNode containerNode)
{
  if (containerNode.Attributes.Count == 0 && !_notToRemove.Contains(containerNode.Name) && (containerNode.InnerText == null || containerNode.InnerText == string.Empty) )
  {
    containerNode.Remove();
  }
  else
  {
    for (int i = containerNode.ChildNodes.Count - 1; i >= 0; i-- )
    {
        RemoveEmptyNodes(containerNode.ChildNodes[i]);
    }
  }
}

edited May 23, 2017 at 11:50

CommunityBot

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answered Mar 25, 2015 at 11:14

Sid

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2 Comments

bearaman Over a year ago

Thanks Assa. In the end, I used a simple html.Replace and that did the trick.

Swapana Thorat Jun 30 at 17:13

This code removed <p><img src="bytearray"/></p> which is wrong how to avoid this?

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