How to capture the value of certain HTML tags

Question

Hi All,
I would like to retrieve the values of the following HTML outputs and is wondering whether there is a simpler method to do:
<td class="propType"><b>Address</b></td>
                        <td class="propType"><b>Agent Office</b></td>
                        <td class="propType"><b>Result</b></td>
                        <td class="propType" align="right"><b>Amount</b></td>
                                <td colspan="6"><strong class="propType">
                                <td><strong>Date</strong></td>
                                <td><strong>Amount</strong></td>
                                <td><strong>Agent Office</strong></td>
                                <td><strong>Selling Agent</strong></td>
                                <td class="even">Aug-07</td>
                                <td class="even">$2,925,000 </td>
                                <td class="even">Di Jones RE</td>
                                <td class="even">Andrew Hennessy</td>One awkard method is by using the stringbuffer as follows:
String greaterthanSignedList[] = greaterthanSigned.split(">") to pickup all the text that comes after the greater than (ie ">" sign)...
String lessthanSignedList[] = lessthanSigned.split("</") to get the string before the less than (ie "</" sign) ...
Here are the output that I am looking for:
Address
Agent Office
Result
Amount
Date
Amount
Agent Office
Selling Agent
Aug-07
$2,925,000
Di Jones RE
However, I am sure that there must be an easier way to do this. Would anyone be able to point me to the right direction?
Many thanks,
Jack

Answer 1

htran_888 wrote:
Only 1 option is needed. ie either XSLT, SAX, DOM... whichever is the simplest.The name Simple API for XML kind of says it all, but you might need to write a lot of unnecessary code. I like to write an XSL stylesheet that converts the input data into something that I can easily parse.
The Java code looks like this:
PipedReader result = new PipedReader();
Writer resultWriter = new PipedWriter(result);
TransformerFactory transFact = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
Transformer trans = transFact.newTransformer(new StreamSource(stylesheet));
trans.transform(new StreamSource(xmlInput), new StreamResult(resultWriter));
resultWriter.close();Writing the XSL stylesheet should be trivial in your case, but you can do a lot with it.
I suggest you toy around a bit with both XSLT and SAX. Traversing the DOM manually is not really advisable.
With kind regards
Ben