How to Parse Only Text from HTML

Question

how can i parse only text from a web page using jsoup using java?

Answer 1

From jsoup cookbook: http://jsoup.org/cookbook/extracting-data/attributes-text-html

String html = "<p>An <a href='http://example.com/'><b>example</b></a> link.</p>";
Document doc = Jsoup.parse(html);
String text = doc.body().text(); // "An example link"

Answer 2

Using classes that are part of the JDK:

import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;
import javax.swing.text.*;
import javax.swing.text.html.*;

class GetHTMLText
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
        throws Exception
    {
        EditorKit kit = new HTMLEditorKit();
        Document doc = kit.createDefaultDocument();

        // The Document class does not yet handle charset's properly.
        doc.putProperty("IgnoreCharsetDirective", Boolean.TRUE);

        // Create a reader on the HTML content.

        Reader rd = getReader(args[0]);

        // Parse the HTML.

        kit.read(rd, doc, 0);

        //  The HTML text is now stored in the document

        System.out.println( doc.getText(0, doc.getLength()) );
    }

    // Returns a reader on the HTML data. If 'uri' begins
    // with "http:", it's treated as a URL; otherwise,
    // it's assumed to be a local filename.

    static Reader getReader(String uri)
        throws IOException
    {
        // Retrieve from Internet.
        if (uri.startsWith("http:"))
        {
            URLConnection conn = new URL(uri).openConnection();
            return new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream());
        }
        // Retrieve from file.
        else
        {
            return new FileReader(uri);
        }
    }
}

Answer 3

Well, here is a quick method I threw together once. It uses regular expressions to get the job done. Most people will agree that this is not a good way to go about doing it. SO, use at your own risk.

public static String getPlainText(String html) {
    String htmlBody = html.replaceAll("<hr>", ""); // one off for horizontal rule lines
    String plainTextBody = htmlBody.replaceAll("<[^<>]+>([^<>]*)<[^<>]+>", "$1");
    plainTextBody = plainTextBody.replaceAll("<br ?/>", "");
    return decodeHtml(plainTextBody);
}

This was originally used in my API wrapper for the Stack Overflow API. So, it was only tested under a small subset of html tags.