Regex Servlet issue

[Dean O'olish]

I am obtaining a string of HTML and I need to parse this HTML and turn it into a text file. I have everything else working except a way to parse the HTML string. There are a handful of tags that I need to do some formatting on; for example a table row (<tr> or <tr class=""..) needs to be replaced with a "\r".

I am having a hard time finding a regular expression that can accomplish this.

Below is exactly what I am trying to do

    
<table>
 <tr>
  <td>Header 1</td><td>Header 2</td><td>Header 3</td><td>Header 4</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td>1</td><td>2</td><td>3</td><td>4</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td>A</td><td>B</td><td>C</td><td>D</td>
 </tr>
</table>

should be parsed to

HEADER1     HEADER2     HEADER3     HEADER4
1            2          3          4
A            B          C          D
 

Can anyone help me out with this?

Thanks!!!

[Bear Bibeault]

Nothing to do with servlets really. Moved to Java in General.

[Henry Wong]

Can anyone help me out with this?

Well, I guess you can extract each row, with a find() on "<tr>(.*?)</tr>". And once you have the row, you can extract the columns, with a find() on "<td>(.*?)</td>". In both cases, the extracted text is in group 1, of course.

Henry

[Piet Verdriet]

Henry Wong wrote:

Can anyone help me out with this?

Well, I guess you can extract each row, with a find() on "<tr>(.*?)</tr>". ...

@OP: be sure to use the DOT-ALL option when using Henry's suggestion: by default, the DOT meta character matches any character except a new line character.
Also note that when there's a (small) mistake in your HTML, the regex can easily break and can produce strange (or unexpected) output. Parsing HTML can bets be done using a dedicated HTML parser which can better recover from improperly formed HTML.

My 2 cents.