9

I was trying to parse out text between specific tags on a mac in various html files. I was looking for the first <H1> heading in the body. Example: 

<BODY>
<H1>Dublin</H1>

Using regular expressions for this I believe is an anti pattern so I used xmllint and xpath instead. 

xmllint --nowarning --xpath '/HTML/BODY/H1[0]'

Problem is some of the HTML files contain badly formed tags. So I get errors on the lines of 

 parser error : Opening and ending tag mismatch: UL line 261 and LI
</LI>

Problem is I can't just do, 2>/dev/null as then I loose those files altogether. Is there any way, I can just use an XPath expression here and just say, relax if the XML isn't perfect, just give me the value between the first H1 headings?

More Than Five
  • 9,959
  • 21
  • 77
  • 127

1 Answers1

13

Try the --html option. Otherwise, xmllint parses your document as XML which is a lot stricter than HTML. Also note that XPath indices are 1-based and that HTML tags are converted to lowercase when parsing. The command

xmllint --html --xpath '/html/body/h1[1]' - <<EOF
<BODY>
<H1>Dublin</H1>
EOF

prints

<h1>Dublin</h1>
nwellnhof
  • 32,319
  • 7
  • 89
  • 113
  • I get even more mismatches when I do that. Instead of ./myfile.html:131: parser error : Opening and ending tag mismatch: UL line 127 and LI I get HTML parser error : Opening and ending tag mismatch: ul and td – More Than Five Mar 08 '17 at 19:40
  • 1
    @MoreThanFive libxml2's HTML parser isn't very forgiving. The `--recover` option might help in addition to `--nowarning` which you already discovered. – nwellnhof Mar 08 '17 at 20:09