Question

public String transform_XML(String type, InputStream file){
        TransformerFactory tf = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
        String xslfile = "/StyleSheets/" + type + ".xsl";
        Transformer t = tf.newTemplates(new StreamSource(this.getClass().getResourceAsStream(xslfile))).newTransformer();
        Source source = new StreamSource(file);
        CharArrayWriter wr = new CharArrayWriter();
        StreamResult result = new StreamResult(wr);
        t.transform(source, result);
     return wr.toString();
}

The above method takes an xsl and xml file as input and returns the transformed result as String. Classes from Package javax.xml.transform has been used to accomplish this.

Now can i use the same package to transform an html file? (Since the package name has xml i seriously doubt it.) What should i do to transform an html file?

Answer 1

As you understand, html documents aren’t necessary valid xml. But you can transform html to xml, and after that manipulate with valid xml (after transformation – you’ll get DOM tree).

I’d suggest you to use CyberNeko HTML Parser to transform html into xml.

Draft example:

import org.cyberneko.html.parsers.DOMParser;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
...
public Document parseHtml(InputStream is) throws Exception {
    DOMParser parser = new DOMParser();
    parser.parse(new InputSource(is));
    return parser.getDocument();
}

If you use maven – you can simply add to your project CyberNeko from repository http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/nekohtml/nekohtml