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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-30T15:41:17+00:00

I posted this on the Jsoup group at google.groups, but there doesn’t seem to

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I posted this on the Jsoup group at google.groups, but there doesn’t seem to be much activity there lately, so I’ll try here as well…

The following code

final String html = "<html><head></head><body><div></div></body></html>";
Document doc = Jsoup.parse(html);
Element body = doc.body();
Element div = body.select("div").first();
body.empty();                   // <--- gives exception at line 56 below
// body.children().remove();    // does not give exception
body.appendChild(div);          // line 56, IndexOutOfBoundsException here

with Jsoup 1.6.1, gives me an IndexOutOfBoundsException with the following (partial, top 7 lines) stack trace

at java.util.ArrayList.RangeCheck(ArrayList.java:547)
at java.util.ArrayList.remove(ArrayList.java:387)
at org.jsoup.nodes.Node.removeChild(Node.java:394)
at org.jsoup.nodes.Node.reparentChild(Node.java:420)
at org.jsoup.nodes.Node.addChildren(Node.java:402)
at org.jsoup.nodes.Element.appendChild(Element.java:225)
at webfilter.FilterY.<init>(FilterY.java:56)

here FilterY is my class containing the code above. If I use body.children().remove() instead of body.empty(), it works fine.

Question is… am I abusing Jsoup here, or is this really a bug?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Yes you are using the jSoup library in a wrong way. Lets go line by line:

    You are saving a reference of first child:

    Element div = body.select("div").first();

    You are removing all of the element’s child nodes:

    body.empty();

    And then you are trying to append the deleted child:

    body.appendChild(div);

    Now the problem is in the last step because when you deleted all the child elements then at that time the parent-child relationship is not broken because body.empty(); just calls the clear(); method of the java.util.List and it does not break any parent-child linkage, which is not the case when you do body.children().remove() and that’s why in the following code you are getting the mentioned exception as there are dangling reference to child node:

     protected void removeChild(Node out) {
        Validate.isTrue(out.parentNode == this);
        int index = out.siblingIndex();
        childNodes.remove(index); // problem comes here
        reindexChildren();
        out.parentNode = null;
    }

    But if you do something like this then it would work:

    Element div_child = doc.createElement("div");
body.appendChild(div_child);
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