New Post: SelectNodes to return empty HtmlNodeCollection if no matching node is found

Then use the LINQ interfaces of Descendants and Elements.

SelectNodes matches the .NET System.Xml API for which it was built upon.

I agree this should be overhauled to return an empty list but the fact is there are thousands of applications out there that could break if this is changed in a minor point release. There were new LINQ like functions added of Descendants, Elements and DescendantNodes to more closely match the LINQ to XML interface.

This is one of the things I wanted to address in 2.0 if I can ever get the time to work on it. The actual current implementation with HtmlNodeCollection needs to be tossed out and replaced with a yield return and an IEnumerable<HtmlNode> return type;

For the people that want this, an extension method can solve it

public static IList<HtmlNode> SelectNodesAsList(this HtmlNode node, string xpath)
{
	var list = node.SelectNodes(xpath);
	if (list == null)
		return new List<HtmlNode>();

	return list;

}