[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: generating DOM from ill-formed HTML docs

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: generating DOM from ill-formed HTML docs
• From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
• Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2002 23:29:29 -0400
• In-reply-to: <20020715020006.44124.qmail@w...>

7/14/2002 10:00:06 PM, Robert Mena <rt_mena@y...> wrote:

>Hi, I am developing an application that will have to
>build a DOM tree of html pages.
>
>I'll use such DOM trees to perform some
>analysis/comparisons.
>
>Since most of the time I'll find ill-formed documents
>I'd like to know if there are any parsers out there
>that "accept" this flaws and builds the tree anyway.
>
>I've tried domxml (php) with no luck.

The standard answer is to use tidy to convert to XHTML.  
http://tidy.sourceforge.net/ and then parse it with an
ordinary XML parser.

The possibly wacky answer is to use Javascript in a browser if
at all possible.  For better or worse (mostly worse!) the browser
vendors have worked hard to "accept the flaws and build a
tree anyway", and then expose that tree with the DOM API. You 
can essentially pretend the ill-formed HTML is XML and use the
XML Core DOM to work with it.  You might need to use some
server-side PHP or whatever to grab web pages, filter in the
Javascript code, and feed it to the browser to work around
the browser/Javascript "sandbox" limitations.

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: generating DOM from ill-formed HTML docs
    • From: "Ramin Firoozye" <ramin@w...>

• References:
  • generating DOM from ill-formed HTML docs
    • From: Robert Mena <rt_mena@y...>

• Prev by Date: Re: generating DOM from ill-formed HTML docs
• Next by Date: Re: XML Diff Markup
• Previous by thread: Re: generating DOM from ill-formed HTML docs
• Next by thread: RE: generating DOM from ill-formed HTML docs
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread