Question

ifstream toOpen;
openFile.open("sample.html", ios::in); 

if(toOpen.is_open()){
    while(!toOpen.eof()){
        getline(toOpen,line);
        if(line.find("href=") && !line.find(".pdf")){   
                start_pos = line.find("href"); 
        tempString = line.substr(start_pos+1); // i dont want the quote
            stop_pos = tempString .find("\"");
                string testResult = tempString .substr(start_pos, stop_pos);
        cout << testResult << endl;
        }
    }

    toOpen.close();
}

What I am trying to do, is to extrat the “href” value. But I cant get it works.

EDIT:

Thanks to Tony hint, I use this:

if(line.find("href=") != std::string::npos ){   
    // Process
}

it works!!

Answer 1

I’d advise against trying to parse HTML like this. Unless you know a lot about the source and are quite certain about how it’ll be formatted, chances are that anything you do will have problems. HTML is an ugly language with an (almost) self-contradictory specification that (for example) says particular things are not allowed — but then goes on to tell you how you’re required to interpret them anyway.

Worse, almost any character can (at least potentially) be encoded in any of at least three or four different ways, so unless you scan for (and carry out) the right conversions (in the right order) first, you can end up missing legitimate links and/or including “phantom” links.

You might want to look at the answers to this previous question for suggestions about an HTML parser to use.