get_meta_tags equivalence

munishdogra · December 27th, 2007, 06:31 AM

how to abstract title and Meta of a page HTML in an array in asp.net and c#. In php, it's easy with get_meta_tags() , but i did not find equivalence in dotnet ?

Please help in this....

samjudson · December 29th, 2007, 06:35 AM

You could build your own using regular expressions (which is basically what the php version does)

e.g. <meta[^>]+name=\"([^\"]*)\"[^>]" . "+content=\"([^\"]*)\"[^>]+>

/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

weicco · December 29th, 2007, 07:47 AM

Actually content is the only required attribute for meta tag. Everything else is optional. Attributes can be also in any order so that regexp doesn't work necessarily.

So what I would do is that I would rip out all the meta tags as whole using regexp: (<meta.+?>)

Then I would use substring to get rid of unnecessary stuff:

Code:

// Get rid of those: "<meta " and ">"
meta = meta.Substring(meta.IndexOf(" ") + 1);
meta = meta.SubString(0, meta.Length - 1);

And now I would split it up:

Code:

string[] attrs = meta.Split(' ');
foreach (string attr in attrs)
{
    string[] tmp = attr.Split('=');
    string key = tmp[0];
    string val = tmp[1];
}

That splitting stuff can also be made by using regexp: (content|http-equiv|name|scheme)="(.*?)"

Wow. Looks awful. Regular expressions are like violence. When you use it, you have to use it a lot! :)