CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javahtmlstringsplit
mnish
mnish

Reputation: 3897

how to split string according to tag name in an HTML page using String.split()

I want to split the following string according to the td tags:

<html>

<body>
  <table>
    <tr><td>data1</td></tr>
    <tr><td>data2</td></tr>
    <tr><td>data3</td></tr>
    <tr><td>data4</td></tr>
  </table>
</body>

I'v tried split("h2"); and split("[h2]"); but this way the split method splits the html code where it finds "h" or "2" and if Iam not mistaken also "h2".

My ultimate goal is to retrieve everything between <td> and </td>

Can anyone please please tell me how to do this with only using split()?

Thanks alot

Upvotes: 0

Views: 15231

Answers (5)

AlexR
AlexR

Reputation: 115378

Here is how to solve your optimal goal:

String html = ""; // your html
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("<td>([^<]*)</td>", Pattern.MULTILINE | Pattern.DOTALL);

for (Matcher m = p.matcher(html);  m.find(); ) {
    String tag = m.group(1);
    System.out.println(tyg);
}

Please note that this code is written here without compiler but it gives the idea.

BUT why do you want to parse HTML using regex? I agree with guys: use HTML or XML parser (if your HTML is well-formatted.)

Upvotes: 2

user473395
user473395

Reputation:

You cannot successfully parse HTML (or in your case, get the data between TD tags) with regular expressions. You should take a look at a simple HTML parser:

import java.io.StringReader;

import javax.swing.text.MutableAttributeSet;
import javax.swing.text.html.HTML.Tag;
import javax.swing.text.html.HTMLEditorKit.ParserCallback;
import javax.swing.text.html.parser.ParserDelegator;

public static List<String> extractTDs(String html) throws IOException {
    final List<String> tdList = new ArrayList<String>();

    ParserDelegator parserDelegator = new ParserDelegator();
    ParserCallback parserCallback = new ParserCallback() {
        StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
        public void handleText(final char[] data, final int pos) {
            buffer.append(data);
        }
        public void handleEndTag(Tag t, final int pos) {  
            if(Tag.TD.equals(t)) {
                tdList.add(buffer.toString());
            }
            buffer = new StringBuffer();
        }
    };

    parserDelegator.parse(new StringReader(html), parserCallback, true);

    return tdList;
}

Upvotes: 1

Johan Sj&#246;berg
Johan Sj&#246;berg

Reputation: 49197

You should really use a html parser, such as neko html or HtmlParser.

Iff you have a very small set of controlled html you could (although I generally recommend against it) use a regex such as

(?<=\\<td\\>)\\w+(?=\\</td\\>)

Upvotes: 0

Sonny Saluja
Sonny Saluja

Reputation: 7287

String.Split or regexes should not be used to parse markup languages as they have no notion of depth (HTML is a recursive grammar needs a recursive parser). Consider what would happen if your <td> looked like:

<td>
  <table><tr><td> td inside a td? </td></tr></table>
</td>

A regex would greedily match everything between the outer <td>...</td> giving you unwanted results.

You should use an HTML parser like Johan mentioned.

Upvotes: 0

Matt Ball
Matt Ball

Reputation: 359966

No.

That would mean — in essence — parsing HTML with regex. We don't do that 'round these parts.

Upvotes: 4

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