Question

I was having trouble finding any documentation at all on a type of parsing I need to do for a Java string.

So, It’s not something simple like parsing by lines or commas or something, it’s a bit more complicated.

My program grabs a web page’s source, and I need to parse it for the content of a view tags.

Something like parsing it for what’s between

<input name="sid" type="hidden" value="

and

" />

So, if the web page had this string:

<input name="sid" type="hidden" value="stringvaluehere" />

It would output

stringvaluehere

Can anyone help? I’ve found no sort of documentation on anything like this at all, and asking around at other sources has been no help.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could use a library for this, such as JSoup. It’s often much easier than trying to parse the DOM manually.

Document doc = Jsoup.connect("http://www.example.com").get();
Elements inputs = doc.select("input#sid");
for(Element input : inputs) {
    System.out.println(input.attr("value"));
}

Simple to use & importantly easy to read.