Question

I’m trying to get the text in between the tags <dev>Text Here</dev>:

<div id="tt" class="info">
  Text Here
</div>

Output: Text Here

How can I achieve this using regex in java? thanks.

EDIT:

I’m using HtmlUnit:

 currentPage.getElementById("tt").asXml();

 currentPage.getElementById("tt").asText(); // returns ""

Answer 1

With regular expressions, you can use the following:

String s = "<div id=\"tt\" class=\"info\">\n  Text Here   \n</div>";
System.out.println(s);
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("<div id=\"tt\" class=\"info\">\\s*([^<]+?)\\s*</div>", Pattern.DOTALL);
Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
if (m.find()) {
    System.out.println(m.group(1));  // Text Here
}

However, a better solution would be to parse the HTML into XHTML, using JTidy, for example, and then extract the required text using XPath (//div[@id = 'tt']/text()). Something along these lines:

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    // Create a new JTidy instance and set options
    Tidy tidy = new Tidy();
    tidy.setXHTML(true); 

    // Parse an HTML page into a DOM document
    URL url = new URL("http://something.com/something.html");       
    Document doc = tidy.parseDOM(url.openStream(), System.out);

    // Use XPath to obtain whatever you want from the (X)HTML
    XPath xpath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
    XPathExpression expr = xpath.compile("//div[@id = 'tt']/text()");
    String text = (String)expr.evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.STRING);
    System.out.println(text); // Text Here
}