Regex for an html text code in Java

Question

I have a html text file that has headings I would like to extract the only the text inside

Example:

<h1 class="title"><a href="dtb.htm#rgn_txt_0001_0001">Fire Safety</a></h1>
<h1><a href="dtb.htm#rgn_txt_0002_0001">About this book</a></h1>
<h1><a href="dtb.htm#rgn_par_0002_0008">1</a></h1>
<h1><a href="dtb.htm#rgn_txt_0003_0001">Contents of this book</a></h1>

I would like extract only the following text from HTML code:

Fire Safety, About this book, 1, Contents of this book

I tried lot of things like:

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("<a[^>]href\\s=\\s*\"\\s*([^\"]*)");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(input);

where input is the html data.

Didn't get any results on the console or sometimes are i am getting only href :(

How do I get to fix this?

Let me know! Thanks!

Please Please Please! Don't parse HTML with Regex. Try jsoup.org — Rohit Jain
– Rohit Jain, Commented Dec 18, 2012 at 7:05
You cannot parse HTML with Regex, lest this happens again: stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/504685 — Charlie
– Charlie, Commented Dec 18, 2012 at 7:06
@RohitJain It's not that you shouldn't parse HTML with RegEx, it's that you can't. — Cubic
– Cubic, Commented Dec 18, 2012 at 7:12
K. why can't I use regEX. What is issue behind it? More over it is not HTML file but it is just HTML source code that are on a text? — TheDevMan
– TheDevMan, Commented Dec 18, 2012 at 8:54
@user1443051 HTML is a non-regular context free language. You can only describe regular languages with regular expressions though. See any introductory article on formal languages for details. — Cubic
– Cubic, Commented Dec 18, 2012 at 12:25

Mayank K. Swami · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-18 07:08:07Z

3

I would strongly recommend to use an HTML parser, something like TagSoup, Jericho, NekoHTML, HTML Parser, etc

answered Dec 18, 2012 at 7:08

Mayank K. Swami

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2 Comments

TheDevMan Over a year ago

I don't have any information on the parser that are available.

Cubic Over a year ago

@user1443051 ... and that's why NullPointer gave you links to 4 of them.

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