Question

I am reading the Head First Android development book. In the third chapter where they try to make an app from NASA RSS feed from here .
In the book the author uses SAX parser for Java. I looked online and some of the answers here on SO suggest that SAX is outdated and there are newer solutions.

However I’m not sure what the easier to use ones are for Java. I have used Nokogiri for Ruby and something similar would be awesome. I looked at jsoup and it looked alright, but I am wondering what suggestions you guys might have.

Answer 1

I’m a big fan of Jsoup. I only recently started using it and its amazing. I used to write some super hairy regex patterns to do pattern matching with because I wanted to avoid SAX like the plague… and that was quite tedious as you can imagine. Jsoup let me parse out specific items from a <table> in just a few lines of code.

Let’s say I want to take the first 7 rows of a table where the <tr class=…> is GridItem or GridAltItem. Then, lets say we want to print the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd columns as text and then the first <a href> link that appears in the row. Sounds goofy, but I had to do this and I can do this easily:

String page = "... some html markup fetched from somewhere ...";
Document doc = Jsoup.parse(page);
for(int x=0; x< 7; x++) {
  Element gridItem = doc.select("tr[class$=Item]").select("tr").get(x);
  System.out.println("row: " + gridItem.select("td").get(0).text() + " " + gridItem.select("td").get(1).text() + " " + gridItem.select("td").get(4).text() + " " + gridItem.select("a").get(0).attr("href"));
}

Its that simple with Jsoup. Make sure you add the Jsoup jar file to your project as a library and import those classes which you need: you don’t want to import the wrong Document or Element class…

import org.jsoup.Jsoup;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Document;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Element;

Enjoy!