Parse multimedia files out of an HTML page (any language)

Question

Given an HTML page I would like to get all the 'x' files that are embedded in the HTML file or are linked by it, where 'x' equals:

• Images (JPG,PNG,GIF...)
• Documents (Word, PowerPoint, PDF...)
• Flash (.flv, .swf)

How do I do this?

1. So images are easy to extract because they are either linked to with a link ending in a (.png|.jpg|....) or they are embedded with an img tag.
2. Documents can not be embedded, they can only be linked to (with a link ending in a .doc|.ppt|.pdf|...). So they are also easy to get.

Here is my problem:

How do I get the flash files that are embedded in webpages?

Please give me a pseudo-algorithm or a regex pattern.

If I am wrong in my points above (1. and 2.) please tell me so too.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The Firefox extension DownThemAll lets you right-click a page and download all of the media of a specified extension. It's open source, so you might want to look at their code and see how they implemented it.

Answer 2

I'd use an event based XML parser (like SAX) and write the rules for the and tags to get the src and href attributes.