Html.SelectNodes Selecting Twice?

[dcroswell]

Hi All,

I'm probably doing something silly but I just don' see it and have lost half my hair trying to figure it out. I'm using HtmlAgilityPack to select some nodes from a screen scrape I've done. Here is the first select.

HtmlNodeCollection _Nodes = html.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//tr[@class = 'RateRow ']");

If I do a count on this node _Nodes.Count I get 6. (ALL GOOD!)

Now I want to manipulate this node(list) and get some info bach from each node, passing it to my method.

foreach (var _Node in _Nodes)
{
Set return object here = ManipulateNode(_Node);
}

In my ManipulateNode method, I take the node and get some "sub" nodes with this statement:

HtmlNodeCollection _nodes = _Node.SelectNodes("//td[starts-with(@class,'week')]|//td[starts-with(@class,'sold')]");

This is where I run into a problem. If I do a _Node.Count now (inside my method), it should give me 14 nodes (days). Instead I get 84 (which is oddly 6 * 14, as if it is selecting the entire list of nodes, not one at a time which is what I'm passing in.

If I use a string to my method (instead of the SelectNodes) , all looks okay. It only passes in the node I want six times and I can see that the inner html is correct.

The problem seems to be when I then convert one of the six nodes passed in to a new Html.NodeCollection. Then I end up with 84 nodes! ARGGGG.

Any help or suggestions would be most appreciated.

Cheers from Sydney.
John

[Peter_B]

Have you tried replacing the // (both of them) in

HtmlNodeCollection _nodes = _Node.SelectNodes("//td[starts-with(@class,'week')]|//td[starts-with(@class,'sold')]");

with 'descendant::'? I think the // at the beginning of the query means to search from the root, i.e. the root of the document.

[dcroswell]

Thanks Pete,

I removed the // and that stopped selecting the root node...

I'm an 'xpath selector noob'.

duh...

I appreciate the reply.

Cheerios from Sydney