Question

How can I get the title of a web page for a given URL using an HTML parser? Is it possible to get the title using regular expressions? I would prefer to use an HTML parser.

I am working in the Java Eclipse IDE.

I have tried using the following code, but was unsuccessful.

Any ideas?

Thank in advance!

import org.htmlparser.Node;

import org.htmlparser.Parser;

import org.htmlparser.util.NodeList;

import org.htmlparser.util.ParserException;

import org.htmlparser.tags.TitleTag;    

public class TestHtml {

public static void main(String... args) {
    Parser parser = new Parser();     
    try {
        parser.setResource("http://www.yahoo.com/");
        NodeList list = parser.parse(null);
        Node node = list.elementAt(0);

        if (node instanceof TitleTag) {
           TitleTag title = (TitleTag) node;


            System.out.println(title.getText());

        }

    } catch (ParserException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}

}

Answer 1

According to your (redefined) question, the problem is that you only check the first node Node node = list.elementAt(0); while you should iterate over the list to find the title (which is not the first). You could also use a NodeFilter for your parse() to only return the TitleTag and then the title would be in the first and you wouldn’t have to iterate.