Extract Content from Div Tag C# Regex

C# Regex extract content of a div

Regex is not a good choice for parsing HTML files..

HTML is not strict nor is it regular with its format..

Use htmlagilitypack

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Why use parser?

Consider your regex..There are infinite number of cases where you could break your code

• Your regex won't work if there are nested divs
• Some divs dont have an ending tag!(except XHTML)

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You can use this code to retrieve it using HtmlAgilityPack

HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.Load(yourStream);

var itemList = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//div[@id='thumbs']")//this xpath selects all div with thubs id
                  .Select(p => p.InnerText)
                  .ToList();

//itemList now contain all the div tags content having its id as thumbs

Regex to extract the contents of a div tag

Your regex works for your example. There are some improvements that should be made, though:

<div[^<>]*class="entry"[^<>]*>(?<content>.*?)</div>

[^<>]* means "match any number of characters except angle brackets", ensuring that we don't accidentally break out of the tag we're in.

.*? (note the ?) means "match any number of characters, but only as few as possible". This avoids matching from the first to the last <div class="entry"> tag in your page.

But your regex itself should still have matched something. Perhaps you're not using it correctly?

I don't know Visual Basic, so this is just a shot in the dark, but RegexBuddy suggests the following approach:

Dim RegexObj As New Regex("<div[^<>]*class=""entry""[^<>]*>(?<content>.*?)</div>")
Dim MatchResult As Match = RegexObj.Match(SubjectString)
While MatchResult.Success
    ResultList.Add(MatchResult.Groups("content").Value)
    MatchResult = MatchResult.NextMatch()
End While

I would recommend against taking the regex approach any further than this. If you insist, you'll end up with a monster regex like the following, which will only work if the form of the div's contents never varies:

<div[^<>]*class="entry"[^<>]*>\s*
<span[^<>]*class="title"[^<>]*>\s*
(?<title>.*?)
\s*</span>\s*
<span[^<>]*class="description"[^<>]*>\s*
<strong>\s*Address:\s*</strong>\s*
(?<address>.*?)
\s*<strong>\s*Telephone:\s*</strong>\s*
(?<phone>.*?)
\s*</span>\s*</div>

or (behold the joy of multiline strings in VB.NET):

Dim RegexObj As New Regex(
    "<div[^<>]*class=""entry""[^<>]*>\s*" & chr(10) & _
    "<span[^<>]*class=""title""[^<>]*>\s*" & chr(10) & _
    "(?<title>.*?)" & chr(10) & _
    "\s*</span>\s*" & chr(10) & _
    "<span[^<>]*class=""description""[^<>]*>\s*" & chr(10) & _
    "<strong>\s*Address:\s*</strong>\s*" & chr(10) & _
    "(?<address>.*?)" & chr(10) & _
    "\s*<strong>\s*Telephone:\s*</strong>\s*" & chr(10) & _
    "(?<phone>.*?)" & chr(10) & _
    "\s*</span>\s*</div>", 
    RegexOptions.Singleline Or RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace)

(Of course, now you need to store the results for MatchResult.Groups("title") etc...)

How to get content between the div tags in C#

You need to use \s* after \n, so that the spaces or even line breaks after the </h3>\n got matched. \s matches any kind of vertical or horizontal white space character.

Regex.Match(data, @"<h3>Opening hours:</h3>\n\s*<div>(.+?)</div>");

DEMO

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