Help with getting links from HTML page

Question

Hello all. I found the sun tutorial for getting HREF values from a tags in an HTML document at <http://java.sun.com/developer/TechTips/1999/tt0923.html>. My question now is how would a person add the ability to get the text of the link to this code?
For example:
Provided the HTML code:<a href="link.html">example</a>Returned is: href=link.html text=example

Answer 1

I think the TechTip you've linked too is quite old (1999). I would write a simple SAXParser that uses TagSoup (http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/tagsoup/) as its input source. In your handler, simply set a flag and reset a StringBuffer to collect the contents of any <a>...</a> element. Simplified:
    public void startElement(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException {
        if ("a".equals(localName)) {
            currentHref = attributes.getValue("href");
            if (currentHref != null && currentHref.length() > 0) {
                inLink = true;
                //reset the string buffer
                buffer.setLength(0);
    public void characters(char[] ch, int start, int length) throws SAXException {
        if (inLink) buf.append(ch, start, length);
    public void endElement(String uri, String localName, String qName) throws SAXException {
        if ("a".equals(localName) && inLink) {
            inLink = false;
            //add link to the stack
            links.add(new Link(currentHref, buffer.toString()));
    }Completely untested, of course... .Good luck...