Parse HTML in Android

Question

I am trying to parse HTML in android from a webpage, and since the webpage it not well formed, I get SAXException.

Is there a way to parse HTML in Android?

I suspect the Rhino dependency will make htmlunit hell to compile on Android, but you could try... Also, some other non-strict HTML parser such as soup might work. — alex, Feb 02 '10 at 22:04

score 76 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 24 '11 at 05:07

76

I just encountered this problem. I tried a few things, but settled on using JSoup. The jar is about 132k, which is a bit big, but if you download the source and take out some of the methods you will not be using, then it is not as big.
=> Good thing about it is that it will handle badly formed HTML

Here's a good example from their site.

File input = new File("/tmp/input.html");
Document doc = Jsoup.parse(input, "UTF-8", "http://example.com/");

//http://jsoup.org/cookbook/input/load-document-from-url
//Document doc = Jsoup.connect("http://example.com/").get();

Element content = doc.getElementById("content");
Elements links = content.getElementsByTag("a");
for (Element link : links) {
  String linkHref = link.attr("href");
  String linkText = link.text();
}

edited Mar 24 '11 at 05:07

Gabe

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answered Feb 09 '11 at 05:30

ibaralf

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You could try including the full jar, and run ProGuard on your app in your production release to strip out unused code. – Andrew Mackenzie Nov 21 '13 at 17:50
3

CAUTION: JSoup is very very slow. – kevin Mar 03 '14 at 06:39
@kevin a source for that claim? You may have some debugging enabled. – goetz Sep 02 '16 at 16:45
What about dynamically loaded content using java script during rendering of the html page on the client side? Will Jsoup show this content as well? – MikeL Nov 06 '16 at 14:04

score 57 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 03 '10 at 10:17

57

Have you tried using Html.fromHtml(source)?

I think that class is pretty liberal with respect to source quality (it uses TagSoup internally, which was designed with real-life, bad HTML in mind). It doesn't support all HTML tags though, but it does come with a handler you can implement to react on tags it doesn't understand.

answered Feb 03 '10 at 10:17

mxk

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This is very simple, I cannot search for exact things (like XPATH) – Nov 09 '15 at 12:08
attention please. this will "Suspending all threads". I face with than when get a json with html format text with in it. there was no problem with showing html text rightly but after use html.fromhtml() I face with this. – David Feb 23 '16 at 13:37

score 25 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 23 '11 at 18:30

25

String tmpHtml = "<html>a whole bunch of html stuff</html>";
String htmlTextStr = Html.fromHtml(tmpHtml).toString();

answered Mar 23 '11 at 18:30

EddieB

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nice and simple, no plugins, love it! tnxs – RonEskinder Dec 16 '15 at 18:28
2

As a note: calling `toString()` on the `Spanned` object returned from `Html.fromHtml(str)` will make many of the `HTML` tags not work (including `` `` ``). So if you're setting a textview just do: `myTextView.setText(Html.fromHtml(str))` – Sakiboy May 11 '16 at 19:34
@Sakiboy You are right. In addition to this there are many other tags that does not work with `Html.fromHtml()`. Check this out http://stackoverflow.com/a/3150456/1987045 – rahulrvp Sep 28 '16 at 13:13
awesome , exactly what i wanted , my server side dev was sending me html , now i can easily convert it to raw string thanks – Zulqurnain Jutt Apr 06 '18 at 08:05

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 06 '18 at 07:30

We all know that programming have endless possibilities.There are numbers of solutions available for a single problem so i think all of the above solutions are perfect and may be helpful for someone but for me this one save my day..

So Code goes like this

  private void getWebsite() {
    new Thread(new Runnable() {
      @Override
      public void run() {
        final StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();

        try {
          Document doc = Jsoup.connect("http://www.ssaurel.com/blog").get();
          String title = doc.title();
          Elements links = doc.select("a[href]");

          builder.append(title).append("\n");

          for (Element link : links) {
            builder.append("\n").append("Link : ").append(link.attr("href"))
            .append("\n").append("Text : ").append(link.text());
          }
        } catch (IOException e) {
          builder.append("Error : ").append(e.getMessage()).append("\n");
        }

        runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {
          @Override
          public void run() {
            result.setText(builder.toString());
          }
        });
      }
    }).start();
  }

You just have to call the above function in onCreate Method of your MainActivity

I hope this one is also helpful for you guys.

Parse HTML in Android

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