Right now I use Jsoup to extract certain information (not all the text) from some third party webpages, I do it periodically. This works fine until the HTML of certain webpage changes, this change leads to a change in the existing Java code, this is a tedious task, because these webpage change very frequently. Also it requires a programmer to fix the Java code. Here is an example of HTML code of my interest on a webpage:
<div>
<p><strong>Score:</strong>2.5/5</p>
<p><strong>Director:</strong> Bryan Singer</p>
</div>
<div>some other info which I dont need</div>
Now here is what I want to do, I want to save this webpage (an HTML file) locally and create a template out of it, like:
<div>
<p><strong>Score:</strong>{MOVIE_RATING}</p>
<p><strong>Director:</strong>{MOVIE_DIRECTOR}</p>
</div>
<div>some other info which I dont need</div>
Along with the actual URLs of the webpages these HTML templates will be the input to the Java program which will find out the location of these predefined keywords (e.g. {MOVIE_RATING}, {MOVIE_DIRECTOR}) and extract the values from the actual webpages.
This way I wouldn't have to modify the Java program every time a webpage changes, I will just save the webpage's HTML and replace the data with these keywords and rest will be taken care by the program. For example in future the actual HTML code may look like this:
<div>
<div><b>Rating:</b>**1/2</div>
<div><i>Director:</i>Singer, Bryan</div>
</div>
and the corresponding template will look like this:
<div>
<div><b>Rating:</b>{MOVIE_RATING}</div>
<div><i>Director:</i>{MOVIE_DIRECTOR}</div>
</div>
Also creating these kind of templates can be done by a non-programmer, anyone who can edit a file.
Now the question is, how can I achieve this in Java and is there any existing and better approach to this problem?
Note: While googling I found some research papers, but most of them require some prior learning data and accuracy is also a matter of concern.
The approach you gave is pretty much similar to the Gilbert's except
the regex part. I don't want to step into the ugly regex world, I am
planning to use template approach for many other areas apart from
movie info e.g. prices, product specs extraction etc.
The template you describe is not actually a "template" in the normal sense of the word: a set static content that is dumped to the output with a bunch of dynamic content inserted within it. Instead, it is the "reverse" of a template - it is a parsing pattern that is slurped up & discarded, leaving the desired parameters to be found.
Because your web pages change regularly, you don't want to hard-code the content to be parsed too precisely, but want to "zoom in" on its' essential features, making the minimum of assumptions. i.e. you want to commit to literally matching key text such as "Rating:" and treat interleaving markup such as"<b/>" in a much more flexible manner - ignoring it and allowing it to change without breaking.
When you combine (1) and (2), you can give the result any name you like, but IT IS parsing using regular expressions. i.e. the template approach IS the parsing approach using a regular expression - they are one and the same. The question is: what form should the regular expression take?
3A. If you use java hand-coding to do the parsing then the obvious answer is that the regular expression format should just be the java.util.regex format. Anything else is a development burden and is "non-standard" and will be hard to maintain.
3B. If you use want to use an html-aware parser, then jsoup is a good solution. Problem is you need more text/regular expression handling and flexibility than jsoup seems to provide. It seems too locked into specific html tags and structures and so breaks when pages change.
3C. You can use a much more powerful grammar-controlled general text parser such as ANTLR - a form of backus-naur inspired grammar is used to control the parsing and generator code is inserted to process parsed data. Here, the parsing grammar expressions can be very powerful indeed with complex rules for how text is ordered on the page and how text fields and values relate to each other. The power is beyond your requirements because you are not processing a language. And there's no escaping the fact that you still need to describe the ugly bits to skip - such as markup tags etc. And wrestling with ANTLR for the first time involves educational investment before you get productivity payback.
3D. Is there a java tool that just uses a simple template type approach to give a simple answer? Well a google search doesn't give too much hope https://www.google.com/search?q=java+template+based+parser&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a. I believe that any attempt to create such a beast will degenerate into either basic regex parsing or more advanced grammar-controlled parsing because the basic requirements for matching/ignoring/replacing text drive the solution in those directions. Anything else would be too simple to actually work. Sorry for the negative view - it just reflects the problem space.
My vote is for (3A) as the simplest, most powerful and flexible solution to your needs.
Not really a template-based approach here, but jsoup can still be a workable solution if you just externalize your Selector queries to a configuration file.
Your non-programmer doesn't even have to see HTML, just update the selectors in the configuration file. Something like SelectorGadget will make it easier to pick out what selector to actually use.
How can I achieve this in Java and is there any existing and better approach to this problem?
The template approach is a good approach. You gave all of the reasons why in your question.
Your templates would consist of just the HTML you want to process, and nothing else. Here's my example based on your example.
<div>
<p><strong>Score:</strong>{MOVIE_RATING}</p>
<p><strong>Director:</strong>{MOVIE_DIRECTOR}</p>
</div>
Basically, you would use Jsoup to process your templates. Then, as you use Jsoup to process the web pages, you check all of your processed templates to see if there's a match.
On a template match, you find the keywords in the processed template, then you find the corresponding values in the processed web page.
Yes, this would be a lot of coding, and more difficult than my description indicates. Your Java programmer will have to break this description down into simpler and simpler tasks until she or he can code the tasks.
If the web page changes frequently, then you'll probably want to confine your search for the fields like MOVIE_RATING to the smallest possible part of the page, and ignore everything else. There are two possibilities: you could either use a regular expression for each field, or you could use some kind of CSS selector. I think either would work and either "template" can consist of a simple list of search expressions, regex or css, that you would apply. Just roll through the list and extract what you can, and fail if some particular field isn't found because the page changed.
For example, the regex could look like this:
"Score:"(.)*[0-9]\.[0-9]\/[0-9]
(I haven't tested this.)
Or you can try different approach, using what i would call 'rules' instead of templates: for each piece of information that you need from the page, you can define jQuery expression(s) that extracts the text. Often when page change is small, the same well written jQuery expressions would still give the same results.
Then you can use Jerry (jQuery in Java), with the almost the same expressions to fetch the text you are looking for. So its not only about selectors, but you also have other jQuery methods for walking/filtering the DOM tree.
For example, rule for some Director text would be (in sort of sudo-java-jerry-code):
$.find("div#movie").find("div:nth-child(2)")....text();
There could be more (and more complex) expressions in the rule, spread across several lines, that for example iterate some nodes etc.
If you are OO person, each rule may be defined in its own implementation. If you are groovy person, you can even rewrite rules when needed, without recompiling your project, and still being in java. Etc.
As you see, the core idea here is to define rules how to find your text; and not to match to patterns as that may be fragile to minor changes - imagine if just a space has been added between two divs:). In this example of mine, I've used jQuery-alike syntax (actually, it's Jerry-alike syntax, since we are in Java) to define rules. This is only because jQuery is popular and simple, and known by your web developer too; at the end you can define your own syntax (depending on parsing tool you are using): for example, you may parse HTML into DOM tree and then write rules using your helper methods how to traverse it to the place of interest. Jerry also gives you access to underlaying DOM tree, too.
Hope this helps.
I used the following approach to do something similar in a personal project of mine that generates a RSS feed out of here the leading real estate website in spain.
Using this tool I found the rented place I'm currently living in ;-)
Get the HTML code from the page
Transform the HTML into XHTML. I used this this library I guess there might be today better options available
Use XPath to navigate the XHTML to the information you're interesting in
Of course every time they change the original page you will have to change the XPath expression. The other approach I can think of -semantic analysis of the original HTML source- is far, far beyond my humble skills ;-)
I have some input containing HTML like <br> <b> <i> etc. I need a way to escape only the "bad" HTML that exposes my site to XSS etc.
After hours of Googeling I found the GWT which looks kinda promising.
What is the recommended way to escape bad HTML?
Edit:
Let me clear things up.
I am using a javascript text editor which outputs html. Wouldn't it be much easier if i use something like bbcode?
OWASP AntiSamy is a project for just that. If you need users to be able to submit structured text, look at markdown (imho a lot better than BBCode).
Google caja is a tool for making third party HTML, CSS and JavaScript safe to embed in your website.
Playframework 2 already offers a solution.
the #Html() function filters bad html, which is really nice.
I really love play2
You might want to just escape all html. If you want to have users be able to use basic html tags like <b> or <i> then you could just replace them with [b] and [i] (if your forum/whatever you're creating can use bbcode), then just replace all "<" and ">" with "<" and ">".
I am creating a HTML parser that gets the HTML from a given URL, finds the navigation menu html, and puts it into a String. The URLs in the HTML that are being copied into the String need part of the URL added (the "www.stackoverflow.com" part). How can I go about finding the existing URLs in the String and adding the missing part to it so that they work.
The URLs in the String are of the form:
<a href="/qestions/11744851.cfm">
and I need to make them in the following form:
<a href="www.stackoverflow.com/questions/11744851.cfm">
Try using this regular expression with the ReplaceAll() method:
str = subString.replaceAll("<a href=\"(.*)\">", "<a href=\"http://www.stackoverflow/$1\">");
If the XHTML is valid XML, the easiest way is to parse it as XML and use XPath (for example /body/div/a#href , where /body/div is path to menu section in HTML.
There is also a project called HTMLParser (http://htmlparser.sourceforge.net/), you may want to give it a try (according to the page, it has 'link extraction, for crawling through web pages or harvesting email addresses'; but I've never used it, so I can't help much).
If on the other hand the HTML is anything but valid, you may want to use http://ccil.org/~cowan/XML/tagsoup/ - it might work, or it might not, on websites we've tried, it did pretty good.
Edit: adding missing part may be done using simple concatenation after finding interesting parts
I need to get everything bewteen
onmouseout="this.style.backgroundColor='#fff'">
and the following <
in this case:
onmouseout="this.style.backgroundColor='#fff'">example<
I would like to get the word example.
Here is a more complicated example of where it should work as well:
onmouseout="this.style.backgroundColor='#fff'">going to drink?<br></span><span title="Juist!" onmouseover="this.style.backgroundColor='#ebeff9'" onmouseout="this.style.backgroundColor='#fff'">Exactly!</span></span></div></div>
So here i need 2 of them back (and not joined).
Could someone help? I suck at regex.
Someone edited my tag to javascript.
I need a solution to use in java, i just get a file as plain text. So javascript or html solutions are not really helpfull.
Regex with html? Well, If you have to parse only a few lines then ok. But in general is better to use a html parser (because HTML is not a regular language).
This is pure gold: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/434171
I have an Android application which grabs some data from an external XML source. I've stripped out some HTML from one of the XML elements, but it's in the format:
<p class="x">Some text...</p>
<p>Some more text</p>
<p>Some final text</p>
I want to extract the middle paragraph text, how can I do this? Would a regular expression be the best way? I don't really want to start including external HTML parsing libraries.
RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags
So, I'll ask the question that wraps up the linked-to answer: have you tried using an XML parser instead?
You might get some ideas from some of the other answers there, too, but I'd try to avoid the regex path. As Macarse suggested, clean this up on the server if you can. If not, wrap those three <p> elements in a single root element and parse it using SAX or something, paying attention to the 2nd paragraph element.
If it's simple, just do a regex.
If you are getting XML from an external source that you own, I would parse it there.
just doing a split: http://developer.android.com/reference/java/lang/String.html#split(java.lang.String)
on "</p><p>" and taking the second entry in the returned array would actually do it pretty quickly
The regex would probably look something like: .*?>(.*?)<.*
And you access the grouped content by calling group(1) on the Matcher object.
If you are going to parse an XML file downloaded from website, then there is nothing to do with Android.