Getting elements by type in malformed HTML

Question

What's the easiest way in Java to retrieve all elements with a certain type in a malformed HTML page? So I want to do something like this:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    // Read in an HTML file from disk
    // Retrieve all INPUT elements regardless of whether the HTML is well-formed
    // Loop through all elements and retrieve their ids if they exist for the element
}

Answer 1

HtmlCleaner is arguably one of the best HTML parsers out there when it comes to dealing with (somewhat) malformed HTML.

Documentation is here with some code samples; you're basically looking for getElementsByName() method.

Take a look at Comparison of Java HTML parsers if you're considering other libraries.

Answer 2

I've had success using tagsoup. Heres a short description from their home page:

This is the home page of TagSoup, a SAX-compliant parser written in Java that, instead of parsing well-formed or valid XML, parses HTML as it is found in the wild: poor, nasty and brutish, though quite often far from short. TagSoup is designed for people who have to process this stuff using some semblance of a rational application design. By providing a SAX interface, it allows standard XML tools to be applied to even the worst HTML. TagSoup also includes a command-line processor that reads HTML files and can generate either clean HTML or well-formed XML that is a close approximation to XHTML.

Answer 3

Check Jtidy.

JTidy is a Java port of HTML Tidy, a HTML syntax checker and pretty printer. Like its non-Java cousin, JTidy can be used as a tool for cleaning up malformed and faulty HTML. In addition, JTidy provides a DOM interface to the document that is being processed, which effectively makes you able to use JTidy as a DOM parser for real-world HTML.