c# - HTML Agility Pack get all anchors' href attributes on page

Question

I am trying to add links extracted from an HTML file to a CheckBoxList (cbl_items).

It works so far but instead of the link, the item's name is displayed as HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlNode. I tried using DocumentElement instead of Node but it said that it does not exist or similar.

How can I get the URL to be displayed instead of HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlNode?

This is what I've tried so far:

HtmlWeb hw = new HtmlWeb();
HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();
doc = hw.Load(tb_url.Text);
foreach (HtmlNode link in doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//a[@href]"))
{
  cbl_items.Items.Add(link);
}

Answer 1

You are adding the HtmlNode object to the CheckBoxList and not the value of the href attribute. What you are seeing is the HtmlNode's ToString() value since that's the best that the CheckBoxList can do to display that object.

Instead, you can use GetAttributeValue(string attribute, string defaultValue) to retrieve the href attribute's value.

HtmlWeb hw = new HtmlWeb();
HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();
doc = hw.Load(tb_url.Text);
foreach (HtmlNode link in doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//a[@href]"))
{
    // Get the value of the HREF attribute
    string hrefValue = link.GetAttributeValue( "href", string.Empty );
    cbl_items.Items.Add(hrefValue);
}