HTML Parsers and reading all files in a directory

Question

Hello all,
I was wondering if there was a html parser included in java. I am writing a program where I want to be able to search all the files in a directory tree for a particular string. I was able to read one file in a single directory but not in any other directory. How would I go about writing code to be able to access all files in directory that has multiple sub folders.
Also, when I started to write my program I tried to use the DOM XML Parser to parse my html page. My logic behind this decision was that if you look at html code it is an xml document. But as I was trying to run my program I noticed that I had to convert my html document into xml format. I really don't want to have to build my own html parser. Is there a html parser that is included in Java. Oh my program is just your basic text program. No interfaces.
Thanks for any help that you can provide
Hockeyfan

Answer 1

a particular string. I was able to read one file in
a single directory but not in any other directory.
How would I go about writing code to be able to
access all files in directory that has multiple sub
folders.
You can do that several ways.
Most likely you'll end up with some sort of recursive iteration over the directory tree.
Not hard to write, somewhat harder to prevent memory problems if you end up with a lot of data.
Also, when I started to write my program I tried to
use the DOM XML Parser to parse my html page. My
logic behind this decision was that if you look at
html code it is an xml document. But as I was
trying to run my program I noticed that I had to
convert my html document into xml format. I really
don't want to have to build my own html parser. Is
there a html parser that is included in Java. Oh my
program is just your basic text program. No
interfaces.
A VALID xhtml document is a valid XML document.
Problem is that most HTML isn't xhtml.
Another problem is that most HTML is fundamentally broken even to its own standards (which have always been based on SGML on which XML is also based).
Browsers take that into account by being extremely lax on standards compliance and effectively making up tags as they go along to fill in the missing ones in the trees they parse.
That's however not a standardised process and each browser handles it differently (and as a result most html will render differently in different browsers).
Java contains a simple HTML parser in Swing, but it's primitive and will only parse a subset of HTML 2.0.
There are almost certainly 3rd party libraries out there that can do better, both free and/or commercial.