Parsing imperfect HTML documents

[Frank LaRosa]

Hi,

What's the recommended way to parse an arbitrary HTML document which
may or may not conform to strict XML syntax requirements?

I tried using a DocumentBuilder, but immediately got the exception
message "Value must be quoted". The exception is thrown out of the
parse method so I have no way to ignore it.

Would a SAXParser be a better idea?

I don't have the option to fix the errors in the source documents.

 

[Marco Schmidt]

Frank LaRosa:

What's the recommended way to parse an arbitrary HTML document which
may or may not conform to strict XML syntax requirements?

HTMLParser is supposedly very stable when confronted with ugly
real-world HTML: <http://htmlparser.sourceforge.net/>.

[...]

Regards,
Marco

 

[Adam Maass]

What's the recommended way to parse an arbitrary HTML document which
may or may not conform to strict XML syntax requirements?

I tried using a DocumentBuilder, but immediately got the exception
message "Value must be quoted". The exception is thrown out of the
parse method so I have no way to ignore it.

Would a SAXParser be a better idea?

I don't have the option to fix the errors in the source documents.

JTidy deals nicely with parsing real-world HTML.

-- Adam Maass

 

[Drew Volpe]

JTidy deals nicely with parsing real-world HTML.

I second the JTidy recommendation. I've used it a fair amount and
it's very good, easy to use, and will output XHTML. The only problem
I had with it were that it's very strict in what it outputs. If the input
html has no equivalent strict html, the page can get mangled. This
comes up primarily with forms which are layed out using tables.


dv

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