After I wrote Fizzler in a burst of development enthusiasm a few months back, it’s been sat on Google Code – a solution in need of a problem to solve. That is until Colin Eberhardt emailed me to report a bug in the selector engine, and to talk a bit about the way he was using Fizzler when working with WPF. This was totally outside the domain I’d anticipated Fizzler being use in, and Colin E has now revealed his project in full. By wrapping part of Fizzler in a few interfaces, thus abstracting it away from HTML and towards a more general purpose solution, he was able to use it to query a XAML UI definition and apply style declarations. CSS selectors for WPF!

This is an amazing use case for a library which I hope will start to see more use in the future. Thanks to Colin E for letting me know about the work which Scottlogic are doing with Fizzler.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been throwing this together in my full time – a class library to pull HTML nodes from a page using a CSS selector. hpricot for Ruby would be a good comparison. It uses the HTML Agility Pack behind the scenes, to clean up the source document, and provide means of reading the document nodes.

I’ve got a limited suite of unit tests which document the current level of support, most CSS 2.1 stuff is in there, and a couple of CSS 3 ones. The unit tests are partially pinched from jQuery’s selector engine unit tests, so thank you to the jQuery team.

It works like this:

SelectorEngine engine = new SelectorEngine(htmlString);
IList nodes = engine.Parse("#p>a");

Pretty simple stuff. There are no binaries yet, as I consider it alpha-quality, but you can check it out over at Google Code. Contributions would be appreciated.