Java String Manipulating HTML Tags

Question

I have a java string with some text and html:

<title>test title</title>
blabla bla more text

What I am trying to achieve is two-fold:

1) Retrieve the content of <title></title> and save it in a separate string.

2) Remove that part of the original string: <title>test title</title>

So the end result would be something like

originalString:

<title>test title</title>
blabla bla more text

newString:

blabla bla more text

pageTitle: test title

How can I achieve this? regular expressions? I can't really grasp it ...

Answer 1

Don't use regular expressions to parse HTML! Try using JTidy or any of these open-source HTML parsers for Java, that fit your requirements.

Using these libraries will make your life much easier because they are designed to parse HTML. You can grab the nodes you want and extract text from them.

Answer 2

This is how you would use a regex to extract the text between the title tags:

    String s = "<title>test title</title>";
    Pattern p = Pattern.compile("<title>(.*?)</title>");
    Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
    while(m.find()){
        System.out.println(m.group(1));
    }

Answer 3

It is inadvisable to parse XML/HTML with regular expressions. However, if you absolutely must do this thing that you have asked, try this:

package org.apache.people.mclark.examples.regex;
import java.util.regex.*;
public class Regex1 {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        final String subjectString = "<title>test title</title>\n" +
          "blabla bla more text"; 
        Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("<title>(.*?)</title>(.*)",
                Pattern.DOTALL);
        Matcher regexMatcher = regex.matcher(subjectString);
        if (regexMatcher.find()) {
            String pageTitle = regexMatcher.group(1);
            String leftOvers = regexMatcher.group(2);
            System.out.println("pageTitle[" + pageTitle + "]");
            System.out.println("leftOvers[" + leftOvers + "]");
        } else {
            System.out.println("no match");
        }
    }
}

I wash my hands of any misbehavior!