[Feature request] Get element by ID

[Silver-Fang]

It's 2022 now and I don't know why you still don't have such a basic function: directly search an element by its ID, instead of having to know its actual path.

If you already have such a function then forgive me for not finding the relevant instructions in your documentation.

[elgonzo]

It's 2022 now and I don't know why you still don't have heard about such basic things like XPath queries. 😘

HAP has a function for XPath queries: https://html-agility-pack.net/select-nodes

XPath queries can be used to find/select nodes in a HTML (or XML) document by a variety of criteria, like for example to find element(s) with an id attribute having a certain value. For example, if you want to find any kind of element with an id "foobar", you could use the XPath query //*[@id='foobar'].

(I am not affiliated in any way with the HAP project. Just a user using the library in a couple of my projects...)

[Silver-Fang]

It's 2022 now and I don't know why you still don't have heard about such basic XML-related things like XPath queries. ;-)

HAP has a function for XPath queries: https://html-agility-pack.net/select-nodes

XPath queries can be used to find/select nodes in a XML document by a variety of criteria, like for example to find element(s) with an id attribute having a certain value. For example, if you want to find any kind of element with an id "foobar", you could use the XPath query //*[@id='foobar'].

(I am not affiliated in any way with the HAP project. Just a user using the library in a couple of my projects...)

Sorry, I'm really not very familiar with XPath.
But I have also investigated some of your well-known competing products, such as Aspose.HTML, AngleSharp, etc. They all straightforwardly provide the GetElementById function and do not require users to understand XPath.
I believe HAP would be more attractive if this function is added, since you specified HTML, where the ID attribute is specially defined, instead of a more general XML in the package title.

[elgonzo]

some of your well-known competing products

In case it got missed what i wrote at the end of my last comment: I am not representing the HAP project. I am not affiliated with the HAP project in any way.

Looking around a bit in the code base of HAP, its HtmlDocument class already has a GetElementById method:

html-agility-pack/src/HtmlAgilityPack.Shared/HtmlDocument.cs

Lines 659 to 664 in c515e20

	/// <summary>
	/// Gets the HTML node with the specified 'id' attribute value.
	/// </summary>
	/// <param name="id">The attribute id to match. May not be null.</param>
	/// <returns>The HTML node with the matching id or null if not found.</returns>
	public HtmlNode GetElementbyId(string id)

For reasons unknown to me, it's not appearing in the online documentation as far as i can tell. But then again, there is no real online API documentation of most of HAP's functionality anyway, so i guess it's par for the course with respect to HAP's documentation... 😕

[Silver-Fang]

some of your well-known competing products

In case it got missed what i wrote at the end of my last comment: I am not representing the HAP project. I am not affiliated with the HAP project in any way.

Looking around a bit in the code base of HAP, its HtmlDocument class already has a GetElementById method:

html-agility-pack/src/HtmlAgilityPack.Shared/HtmlDocument.cs

Lines 659 to 664 in c515e20

	/// <summary>
	/// Gets the HTML node with the specified 'id' attribute value.
	/// </summary>
	/// <param name="id">The attribute id to match. May not be null.</param>
	/// <returns>The HTML node with the matching id or null if not found.</returns>
	public HtmlNode GetElementbyId(string id)

For reasons unknown to me, it's not appearing in the online documentation as far as i can tell. But then again, there is no real online API documentation of most of HAP's functionality anyway, so i guess it's par for the course with respect to HAP's documentation... 😕

Then this issue becomes to add the documentation …
Many people won't bother to download it if they can't find the function they want in the documentation, especially when there're many other options.

[elgonzo]

Then this issue becomes to add the documentation …

True.