Html Agility Pack creating irrelevant characters on save html file in c#

Question

I am working on project using asp.net mvc3 C# . I want to change some html element

attributes by c# like width , height etc. I have a simple (_Layout.cshtml) file

    <html> <head>
    <link href="@Url.Content("file.css")" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    <body>

     <a href="#" id="link1" title="@Function.ConfigElement("FacebookLink")" ></a>

     </body>
    </head> </html>

So i am using html agility pack to load and save this file

HtmlDocument doc= new HtmlDocument();

doc.load("_Layout.cshtml");

doc.GetElementbyId("link1").Attributes.Add("title", "@Function.ConfigElement("NewLink")");

doc.save("_Layout.cshtml");

After saving file output is like this

<html> <head>
        <link href="@Url.Content("file.css")"="" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
        <body>

         <a href="#" id="link1" title="@Function.ConfigElement("NewLink")"="" ></a>

         </body>
        </head> </html>

in (link href) and (anchor title) saving some extra characters

How can i avoid this problem .. Is there any other solution for parse html in c# for asp.net mvc.

Actually I want to add some server side function in these html element attributes

I suppose you could just do a `string.Replace("=\"\"", "");` to strip out the extra characters. That *is* a little weird, though. — Robert Harvey, Dec 06 '12 at 19:16

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 06 '12 at 19:16

3

As StackOverflow's syntax highlight subtly hints, your HTML is extremely invalid.

href="@Url.Content("file.css")"

This is actually two attributes: href="@Url.Content(" and file.css")". (which has no value)

You can't use an HTML parser to parse Razor markup.
Instead, you should use the actual Razor parser.

answered Dec 06 '12 at 19:16

SLaks

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Any example/reference for reading/modifying .cshtml files using Razor parser? – Mathivanan KP May 16 '17 at 08:42

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 06 '12 at 19:18

1

CSCHTML is not HTML. It is mix of CS, special scripts and optionally HTML - so HtmlAgilityPack is not a good tool to read/manipulate it.

Why it happens in particular:

<link href="@Url.Content("file.css")"

Form HTML point of view there are 2 attributes and (href and file.css) plus strange ")" unexpected text. Somehow AgilityPack tries to make sense of it and outputs whatever you got.

answered Dec 06 '12 at 19:18

Alexei Levenkov

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Actually, the `")"` is part of the second attribute. (since there is no `=`) – SLaks Dec 06 '12 at 19:25
@SLaks, probably - have not read HTML spec that carefully to know if attribute name ends on "=" or anything that is not letters... In any case it just not reasonable HTML element. (you already gave correct answer :) ) – Alexei Levenkov Dec 06 '12 at 19:33

Html Agility Pack creating irrelevant characters on save html file in c#

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