Can anyone recommend a C or Objective-C library for HTML parsing? It needs to handle messy HTML code that won't quite validate.
Does such a library exist, or am I better off just trying to use regular expressions?
9 Answers
Looks like libxml2.2 comes in the SDK, and libxml/HTMLparser.h claims the following:
This module implements an HTML 4.0 non-verifying parser with API compatible with the XML parser ones. It should be able to parse "real world" HTML, even if severely broken from a specification point of view.
That sounds like what I need, so I'm probably going to use that.
This probably depends on how messy the HTML is and what you want to extract. But usually Tidy does quite a good job. It is written in C and I guess you should be able to build and statically link it for the iPhone. You can easily install the command line version and test the results first.
You may want to check out ElementParser. It provides "just enough" parsing of HTML and XML. Nice interfaces make walking around XML / HTML documents very straightforward. http://touchtank.wordpress.com/
How about using the Webkit component, and possibly third party packages such as jquery for tasks such as these? Wouldn't it be possible to fetch the html data in an invisible component and take advantage of the very mature selectors of the javascript frameworks?
Google's GData Objective-C API reimplements NSXMLElement and other related classes that Apple removed from the iPhone SDK. You can find it here http://code.google.com/p/gdata-objectivec-client/. I've used it for dealing messaging via Jabber. Of course if your HTML is malformed (missing closing tags) this might not help much.
Related