Question

I’m trying to parse meta tags with Scala. I’ve tried just doing this with XML matching, like

`html // meta ...` etc,

but I’m getting a malformed-XML error because these meta tags on this particular page have no ending tag or ... /> enclosure.

So for the following HTML,

val html = """<meta name="description" content="This is some meta description">"""

I’m using the following regex matcher:

val metaDescription = """.*meta name="Description" content="([^"]+)"""".r

• When I try to match with val metaDescription(desc) = html I get a scala.MatchError.
• When I try with metaDescription.findAllIn(html) and iterate, I get the whole string–not just the description.

How can I just get the value inside content and nothing else?

EDIT

I got the result I wanted with:

metaDescription.findAllIn(html).matchData foreach {
  desc => println(desc.group(1))
} 

but that seems like a long way around. Is there a better solution?

Answer 1

Scala XML and TagSoup provides one way to use tag soup directly with Scala XML.

If you are open to alternatives then Scales Xml provides a similar useful approach to parse html via alternative SAX parsers:

val html = loadXmlReader(htmlStream, parsers = AlternateSAXFactoryPool)

example factories for Tagsoup and Nu.Validator are provided on that link.