I am looking for a simple lightweight java library that parses HTML. I have looked a lot and there are many options out there. But I cannot find something simple. I really would like to have something like pyquery in python except in java. My requirements are: fast, easy to use and lightweight.
What do I need it for? Not sure if this matters, but I need to index parts of an html documents. So I am hoping to be able to select part of that document quickly and then parse it.
try groovy. It has a number of "slurpers," which are DSLs for reading in markup like XML and HTML, as well as JSON. here for example.
If you want a jQuery like library, as your the title of your question suggests, you should had a look over GWT.
GWT will let you explore the DOM of your page. Try the tutorial and in 30 minutes you will be sure if you want to know more or not...
Use tagsoup to normalize the HTML into xhtml, and XOM to parse the resulting document. It's not that hard.
XPath will give you easy selection similiar to CSS selectors.
I have used HTMLParser in the past. I wasn't very happy with it. I found tagsoup and jsoup. I am really liking jsoup. Haven't used it extensively yet but you can do something like:
Elements resultLinks = doc.select("h3.r > a"); // direct a after h3