Help with Java Swing HTML parsing

Question

I am parsing a collection of HTML documents with the Java Swing HTML parsing libraries and I am trying to isolate the text between <title> tags so that I can use them to identify the documents but I am having a hard time accomplishing that since the handleStartTag method doesn't have access to the text inside of the tags

Answer 1

You can use XPath to pull out data from HTML:

String html = //...

//read the HTML into a DOM
StreamSource source = new StreamSource(new StringReader(html));
DOMResult result = new DOMResult();
Transformer transformer = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
transformer.transform(source, result);
Node root = result.getNode();

//use XPath to get the title
XPath xpath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
String title = xpath.evaluate("/html/title", root);

However, the HTML must be well formed XHTML for this to work. For example, the "<br>" tag is valid in HTML, but is invalid in XHTML because it is not closed. It must be "<br />" to be valid in XHTML.