Parse a document from a String

Jan 17, 2010

Problem

You have HTML in a Java String, and you want to parse that HTML to get at its contents, or to make sure it’s well formed, or to modify it. The String may have come from user input, a file, or from the web.

Solution

Use the static Jsoup.parse(String html) method, or Jsoup.parse(String html, String baseUri) if the page came from the web, and you want to get at absolute URLs (see Working with URLs).

String html = "<html><head><title>First parse</title></head>"
  + "<body><p>Parsed HTML into a doc.</p></body></html>";
Document doc = Jsoup.parse(html);

Description

The parse(String html, String baseUri) method parses the input HTML into a new Document. The base URI argument is used to resolve relative URLs into absolute URLs, and should be set to the URL where the document was fetched from. If that’s not applicable, or if you know the HTML has a base element, you can use the parse(String html) method.

As long as you pass in a non-null string, you’re guaranteed to have a successful, sensible parse, with a Document containing (at least) a head and a body element.

Once you have a Document, you can get at the data using the appropriate methods in Document and its supers Element and Node.