Question

I’m building an application for a company that, unfortunately, has a very poorly designed website. Most of the HTML tags are wrongly and sometimes randomly placed, there is excessive use of no-break-spaces, p tags are randomly assigned, they don’t follow any rule and so on…

I’m retrieving data from their website by using a crawler and then feeding the resulted strings to my application through my own web-service. The problem is that once displaying it into the android textview, the text is formatted all wrong, spread and uneven, very dissorderly.

Also, worth mentioning that I can not suggest to the company for various reasons to modify their website…

I’ve tried

String text = Html.fromHtml(myString).toString();

and other variations, I’ve even tried formatting it manually but it’s been a pain.

My question is:

Is there an easy, elegant way to re-format all this text, either with PHP on my web-service or with Java, directly in my Android application?

Thanks to anyone who will take the time to answer…

Answer 1

Probably not the most elegant solution, but I managed to get the best results by stripping some tags according to what I needed with php (that was really easy to do) and then displaying the retrieved strings into formatted WebViews.

As I said, probably not the most elegant solution but in this case it worked best for me.