How to scrape strings inside given tags?

Question

I have a XML read into a one single String. I need to get all the data inside <code> tags. I do not need to go though whole XML file parsing them. Can i use a simple string processing technique to get the data inside those tags.

input : <a><b><code>Hello</code></b><code>World</code></a>

output : Hello, World

If that syntax is always the same or very regular you can probably use regular expressions. But it's way safer if you use some real XML processing like jondev.net/articles/Android_XML_SAX_Parser_Example — zapl
– zapl, Commented Mar 15, 2012 at 11:24
can you suggest how to create a regular expression for above? and how to call it? Thank you — dinesh707
– dinesh707, Commented Mar 15, 2012 at 11:25
see here stackoverflow.com/questions/335250/… "<code>(.*?)</code>" would match your code tags and matcher.group(1) would contain the text. But be aware that this is not going to work (or needs way more complicated regexes) if the xml could be like < code attribute="something"> or can contain <code> or other tags inside <code> etc. XML is not a regular language so there are cases that can't be done with regular expressions. — zapl
– zapl, Commented Mar 15, 2012 at 11:54

Nishant · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-15 12:16:06Z

3

Regex is not an advisable tool to play with XML, specially when there are sophiticated many parsers are there. You may use javax.xml.xpath package to do this stuff for you like:

    XPath xp = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
    NodeList nl =  (NodeList)xp.evaluate("//code", new InputSource(new StringReader("<a><b><code>Hello</code></b><code>World</code></a>")), XPathConstants.NODESET);
    for(int i=0; i< nl.getLength(); i++){
        System.out.print(nl.item(i).getTextContent()+", ");
    }

will result

Hello, World,

answered Mar 15, 2012 at 12:16

Nishant

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Comments

rosco · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-15 11:23:18Z

0

Follow the example here: it's simple.

answered Mar 15, 2012 at 11:23

rosco

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