jsoup - strip all formatting and link tags, keep text only

WonderCsabo picture WonderCsabo · Oct 17, 2012 · Viewed 40.5k times · Source

Let's say i have a html fragment like this:

<p> <span> foo </span> <em> bar <a> foobar </a> baz </em> </p>

What i want to extract from that is:

foo bar foobar baz

So my question is: how can i strip all the wrapping tags from a html and get only the text in the same order as it is in the html? As you can see in the title, i want to use jsoup for the parsing.

Example for accented html (note the 'á' character):

<p><strong>Tarthatatlan biztonsági viszonyok</strong></p>
<p><strong>Tarthatatlan biztonsági viszonyok</strong></p>

What i want:

Tarthatatlan biztonsági viszonyok
Tarthatatlan biztonsági viszonyok

This html is not static, generally i just want every text of a generic html fragment in decoded human readable form, width line breaks.

Answer

ollo picture ollo · Oct 17, 2012

With Jsoup:

final String html = "<p> <span> foo </span> <em> bar <a> foobar </a> baz </em> </p>";
Document doc = Jsoup.parse(html);

System.out.println(doc.text());

Output:

foo bar foobar baz

If you want only the text of p-tag, use this instead of doc.text():

doc.select("p").text();

... or only body:

doc.body().text();

Linebreak:

final String html = "<p><strong>Tarthatatlan biztonsági viszonyok</strong></p>"
        + "<p><strong>Tarthatatlan biztonsági viszonyok</strong></p>";
Document doc = Jsoup.parse(html);

for( Element element : doc.select("p") )
{
    System.out.println(element.text());
    // eg. you can use a StringBuilder and append lines here ...
}

Output:

Tarthatatlan biztonsági viszonyok  
Tarthatatlan biztonsági viszonyok