I'm just getting started with HTTPClient, and I want to take a webpage and extract out the raw text from it minus all the html markup.
Can HTTPClient accomplish that? If so, how? Or is there another library I should be looking at?
for example if the page contains
<body><p>para1 test info</p><div><p>more stuff here</p></div>
I'd like it to output
para1 test info more stuff here
The HTML Parser library might be what you are looking for. It allows for extraction of content from a HTML document.
I'd suggest using HttpComponents Client (HTTPClient 4) (instead of version 3 you've linked to).
This being said, it's independent of the HTTP client library (there are others). What you need is to convert the HTML into plain text. This could be of interest: http://www.rgagnon.com/javadetails/java-0424.html
No. HttpClient handles network protocol - sending requests and receiving responses. It's up to you to figure out what to do with the response once you receive it. That said, you can use other libraries to parse HTML as others suggested.