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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T01:53:58+00:00

I am currently attempting (or planning to attempt) to write a simple (as possible)

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I am currently attempting (or planning to attempt) to write a simple (as possible) program to parse an html document into a tree.

After googling I have found many answers saying “don’t do it it’s been done” (or words to that effect); and references to examples of HTML parsers; and also a rather emphatic article on why one shouldn’t use Regular expresions. However I haven’t found any guides on the “right” way to write a parser. (This, by the way, is something I’m attempting more as a learning exersise than anything so I’d quite like to do it rather than use a premade one)

I believe I could make a working XML parser just by reading the document and adding the tags/text etc. to the tree, stepping up a level whenever I hit a close tag (again, simple, no fancy threading or efficiency required at this stage.). However, for HTML not all tags are closed.

So my question is this: what would you recommend as a way of dealing with this? The only idea I’ve had is to treat it in a similar way as the XML but have a list of tags that aren’t necessarily closed each with conditions for closure (e.g. <p> ends on </p> or next <p> tag).

Has anyone any other (hopefully better) suggestions? Is there a better way of doing this altogether?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    so, I’ll try for an answer here –

    basically, what makes “plain” html parsing (not talking about valid xhtml here) different from xml parsing are loads of rules like never-ending <img>tags, or, strictly speaking, the fact that even the sloppiest of all html markups will somewhat render in a browser.
    You will need a validator along with the parser, to build your tree. But you’ll have to decide on a standard for HTML you want to support, so that when you come across a weakness in the markup, you’ll know it’s an error and not just sloppy html.

    know all the rules, build a validator, and then you’ll be able to build a parser. that’s Plan A.

    Plan B would be, to allow for a certain error-resistance in your parser, which would render the validation step needless. For example, parse all the tags, and put them in a list, omitting any attributes, so that you can easily operate on the list, determining whether a tag is left open, or was never opened at all, to eventually get a “good” layout tree, which will be an approximate solution for sloppy layout, while being exact for correct layout.

    hope that helped!

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