Question

I’ve been trying to make an app for a website for a while. I used webview at first, but now I’m creating my own app look with buttons, textview etc….

And whenever there is a query into the website database, I post into the site and get the contents(loaded html code into textview and webview) as seen in demo app pic below.

I used HttpPost and HttpResponse and everything works. Now, the remaining part is that I want to search through the string with the html code and get only the part that looks like the middle part in the webview in image below, which is the table in the middle with the main content.

The site is written completely using tables. and the part I want has this structure.

<td id="main_content" class="text"> 
    <table>
        <tr>
            <td></td>
            <td></td>
            <td></td>
            <td></td>
            <td></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td></td>
            <td></td>
            <td></td>
            <td></td>
            <td></td>
        </tr>
            .
            .
            .
            depending on results
    </table> 
</td>

I know I can use JSON and php scripts to post and get results, but the thing is I don’t have access to the webpage or the server. What is the regular expression to use in this case because I can’t get it working. I only have basic knowledge in regular expression searching. Thank you.

app demo image

Answer 1

Consider using JSoup instead: Android JSoup Example. As another commenter noted, RegEx isn’t really an appropriate tool for parsing HTML generally.