Android XML Adventure - Parsing HTML using JSoup

Article Series: Android XML Adventure

Author: Pete Houston (aka. `xjaphx`)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. What is the “Thing” called XML?
2. Parsing XML Data w/ SAXParser
3. Parsing XML Data w/ DOMParser
4. Parsing XML Data w/ XMLPullParser
5. Create & Write XML Data
6. Compare: XML Parsers
   
7. Parsing XML using XPath
   
8. Parsing HTML using HtmlCleaner
9. Parsing HTML using JSoup
10. Sample Project 1: RSS Parser – using SAXParser
11. Sample Project 1: RSS Parser – using DOM Parser
12. Sample Project 1: RSS Parser – using XMLPullParser
13. Sample Project 2: HTML Parser – using HtmlCleaner
14. Sample Project 2: HTML Parser – using JSoup
15. Finalization on the “Thing” called XML!

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Another library used common for parsing HTML is JSoup.

Unlike HtmlCleaner, JSoup uses the concept of attributes as a selector to identify each node in HTML tree.

I suggest you should learn the basics syntax of JSoup selector before continue, http://jsoup.org/cookbook/extracting-data/selector-syntax

Well, we will do the same thing as previous article, we get the blog statistics using JSoup.

The syntax is like this: ” div#blog-stats ul li “

Literally, it means: select the node <li> inside node <ul> , which has parent is a <div> having ID value is “blog-stats“.

Download the libary JSoup and add it as “External JARs”.

Head straight to the source code to get our desire value:

package pete.android.study;

import org.jsoup.Jsoup;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Document;
import org.jsoup.select.Elements;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.widget.TextView;

public class JSoupStudyActivity extends Activity {

	// blog url
	static final String BLOG_URL = "http://xjaphx.wordpress.com/";

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    	// set layout view
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);

        // process
        try {
        	((TextView)findViewById(R.id.tv)).setText(getBlogStats());
        } catch (Exception ex) {
        	((TextView)findViewById(R.id.tv)).setText("Error");
        }
    }

    protected String getBlogStats() throws Exception {
    	String result = "";
    	// get html document structure
    	Document document = Jsoup.connect(BLOG_URL).get();
    	// selector query
    	Elements nodeBlogStats = document.select("div#blog-stats ul li");
    	// check results
    	if(nodeBlogStats.size() > 0) {
    		// get value
    		result = nodeBlogStats.get(0).text();
    	}

    	// return
    	return result;
    }
}

Remember to add INTERNET permission. Here the result on my Galaxy S II phone, which is a little chocky-cocky:

JSoup Sample

Not so much different from XPath, is it?

Cheers,

Pete Houston

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