C# Web Scraping Guide: From Setup to Production Code

Want to scrape websites with C#? This guide shows you how to build production-ready scrapers using HtmlAgilityPack and Selenium. You'll learn to extract data from both static HTML and JavaScript-rendered pages, then export everything to CSV. 🚀 Try Decodo's Web Scraping API: https://decodo.com/scraping/web 📖 Full tutorial with code: https://decodo.com/blog/csharp-web-scraping-guide 📋 What you'll learn: ✔️ Setting up your C# development environment with .NET SDK and VS Code ✔️ Scraping static HTML pages with HtmlAgilityPack using XPath selectors ✔️ Handling JavaScript-rendered content with Selenium WebDriver ✔️ Extracting and cleaning data, including HTML entities ✔️ Structuring scraped data with C# classes ✔️ Exporting results to CSV with CsvHelper 🛠️ Packages covered: ✔️ HtmlAgilityPack ✔️ Selenium.WebDriver ✔️ CsvHelper FAQs: ❓What's the difference between HtmlAgilityPack and Selenium for C# web scraping? HtmlAgilityPack parses static HTML that's already in the page source. It's fast and lightweight. Selenium launches a real browser and waits for JavaScript to render content. ❓How do I handle HTML entities when scraping with C#? Use HtmlEntity.DeEntitize() to convert encoded characters like ' (apostrophes) and " (quotes) into readable text. Without this step, your scraped data will contain these encoded entities instead of actual punctuation marks. ❓What packages do I need for C# web scraping? For static pages, install HtmlAgilityPack. For JavaScript-rendered sites, install Selenium.WebDriver and Selenium.WebDriver.ChromeDriver. To export data to CSV, add CsvHelper. Install all packages using the dotnet add package command. ⏰ Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction to C# Web Scraping 00:08 Environment Setup: .NET SDK & VS Code 00:28 Project Creation & Package Installation 00:43 Scraping Static Pages with HtmlAgilityPack 00:56 HTML Inspection & Data Extraction 01:32 Scraping Dynamic Pages with Selenium 01:46 Selenium Setup & Data Structuring 02:05 Configuring an