iPhone SDK:HTML parsing standard way or example:

Question

Hi,

I am accessing a web page using NSURLConnection and have a HTML data downloaded programmatically in my iPhone client application. I want to parse and pick some description data from the HTML tags..It is too dirty tags and my data is also here and there. I would like to ask you, is there a standard or easy way of parsing of HTML data on iPhone development. P.S: I know about XML parsing.

thanks.

Clave/

Answer 1

libxml2.2 comes in the SDK, and libxml/HTMLparser.h claims the following:

This module implements an HTML 4.0 non-verifying parser with API compatible with
the XML parser ones. It should be able to parse "real world" HTML, even if
severely broken from a specification point of view.

It shouldn't be too difficult to use that, but if all else fails you could always load up a UIWebView in the background and have it load the content for you.

Answer 2

hey i tried to parse html file by using HTMLParser class but contents is returning "NULL" here is the code:

HTMLParser * parser =[[HTMLParser alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath[[[NSBundle mainBundle]resourcePath]stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"chapter-001.xml"]] error:error];

if (error)
{
    NSLog(@"Error: %@", error);
    return ;
}

HTMLNode *htmlnode = [parser html];

NSLog(@"%@",[htmlnode contents]);

Please can any one help me :)