Is it a good idea? Well I have used other 3rd party Libraries like JSoup and it works great, but for this project it’s different. Is it worth it to load and parse a whole document when you just want to get one item from it? Some of the html pages are simple too, so I could use String methods too. Reason is cause memory will be an issue, and it also takes some time to load the document too. When parsing XML I always use a SAX Parser because it doesn’t load it in memory and it is fast. Could I use the same thing on html documents, or is there already one like this out there? So if there is a non-DOM HTML lightweight parser, that would be great too.
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If the HTML is XML compliant (i.e. it’s XHTML) then you can use a standard SAX parser. Here you can find a list of HTML parsers in Java to choose from: http://java-source.net/open-source/html-parsers. HotSax probably will handle all your use cases.