Issue parsing html using powershell and xpath

Question

This is a follow up question to one I asked last week, posted here. I have gotten past the original issue but now I am running into a slightly different issue. I am now able to get the attribute of an item I'm interested in if the html tags aren't nested using the GetAttributeValue method, here it is the data-pid but I am now having trouble grabbing the attribute of an item that is in nested tags, in my code snippet it is the date. I am using xpath and the HtmlAgility pack to parse the html here but in the example below the same date gets returned over and over. Here is what the $item object looks like: ``` Attributes : {class, data-pid} ChildNodes : {#text, a, #text, span...} Closed : True ClosingAttributes : {} FirstChild : HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlTextNode HasAttributes : True HasChildNodes : True HasClosingAttributes : False Id : InnerHtml : $20 Nov 30…

Accepted Answer

I haven't used the HTML Agility Pack, but AFAICS built-in tools should suffice anyway:

```
$url = 'http://www.example.com/path/to/some.html'

$html = (Invoke-Webrequest $url).ParsedHTML

$html.getElementsByTagName('p') | ? { $_.className -eq 'row' } | % {
  $ID   = $_.getAttributeNode('data-pid').value
  $Date = $_.getElementsByTagName('span') | ? { $_.className -eq 'date' } |
          % { $_.innerText }

# do stuff with $ID and $Date
  "{0}: {1}" -f $ID, $Date
}
```

Note that `Invoke-Webrequest` requires PowerShell v3. Use the Internet Explorer COM object if your limited to PowerShell v2:

```
$ie = New-Object -COM InternetExplorer.Application
$ie.Navigate($url)
while ($ie.ReadyState -ne 4) { sleep 100 }
$html = $ie.Document
```

If your HTML file is a local file, replace the `Invoke-Webrequest` line with something like this:

```
$htmlfile = 'C:\path	o\some.html'

$html = New-Object -COM HTMLFile
$html.write((Get-Content $htmlfile | Out-String))
```

Issue parsing html using powershell and xpath

Solution

Problem