Help with Xpath (normalize space)

[Datadayne]

Hey guys, I need a little help with my vb app. Ive used the HtmlAgilityPack and Xpath method to retrieve some text from a webpage but its also retrieving all the spacing, I would like to remove all the spaces somehow.

Here is my vb code so far:

        Dim content2 As String = ""
        Dim web2 As New HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlWeb
        Dim doc2 As HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument = web2.Load("http://www.yellowpages.ca/search/si/1/Estheticians/Calgary+AB ")
        Dim hnc2 As HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlNodeCollection = doc2.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//div[@class='address']")
        For Each link As HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlNode In hnc2
            Dim replaceUnwanted As String = ""
            replaceUnwanted = link.InnerText.Replace("&", "&") '
            replaceUnwanted = replaceUnwanted.Replace("'", "'")

            content2 &= replaceUnwanted & vbNewLine
        Next
        RichTextBox2.Text = content2

Any ideas?

[reedy837]

I'm not 100% sure without seeing a sample of the text and whitespace, but this should be able to be resolved using the XPath function, normalize-space(string).

http://www.w3schools.com/Xpath/xpath...ons.asp#string

The XPath could look like:
//normalize-space(div[@class='address'])

[Datadayne]

Im getting '//normalize-space(div[@class='address'])' has an invalid token.

Here is the formatting without the normalize-space:

																																									101-424 10 St NW, Calgary,  AB,  T2N1V9 				
																											
																														

																																									2359 Banff Trail NW, Calgary,  AB,  T2M4L2

Thats 2 addresses, there are more than 10.

[tkorsano]

without xml source is hard to figure this out, but maybe

//div[@class='address']/text()[normalize-space(.)]

best regards,

tonci korsano

[JBourgeois]

Cutting and pasting your result in Word (wonderful tool to see what lies under white spaces), I see that your white space is created with tabulations, so the following should do the trick:

Content2=Content2.Replace(ControlChars.Tab, "")

You will be left with real spaces after the comas, which you may not want, depending on the treatment you do with that data later on.

If you split the string on the comas, simply trim it after the split to remove the extraneous spaces.

Or you can remove them right there with :

Content2=Content2.Replace(", ", ",")
Content2=Content2.Replace(", ", ",")

You need to do it twice because come of the comas are followed by 2 spaces.

[Datadayne]

Thanks guys, in combination of tkorsano and JBourgeois suggestion, I got the result I wanted.