Convert a string or html file to C# HtmlDocument without using WebBrowser or HAP

Question

The only solution I could find was using:

            mshtml.HTMLDocument htmldocu = new mshtml.HTMLDocument();
            htmldocu .createDocumentFromUrl(url, "");

and I am not sure about the performance, it should be better than loading the html file in a WebBrowser and then grab the HtmlDocument from there. Anyhow, that code does not work on my machine. The application crashes when it tries to execute the second line.

Has anyone an approach to achieve this efficiently or any other way?

NOTE: Please understand that I need the HtmlDocument object for DOM processing. I do not need the html string.

Answer 1

Use the DownloadString method of the WebClient object. e.g.

WebClient client = new WebClient();
string reply = client.DownloadString("http://www.google.com");

In the above example, after executed, reply will contain the html markup of the endpoint http://www.google.com.

WebClient.DownloadString MSDN