Parsing and traversing a Document

To parse a HTML document:

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

(See parsing a document from a string for more info.)

The parser will make every attempt to create a clean parse from the HTML you provide, regardless of whether the HTML is well-formed or not. It handles:

  • unclosed tags (e.g. <p>Lorem <p>Ipsum parses to <p>Lorem</p> <p>Ipsum</p>)
  • implicit tags (e.g. a naked <td>Table data</td> is wrapped into a <table><tr><td>…)
  • reliably creating the document structure (html containing a head and body, and only appropriate elements within the head)

The object model of a document

  • Documents consist of Elements and TextNodes (and a couple of other misc nodes: see the nodes package tree).
  • The inheritance chain is: Document extends Element extends Node. TextNode extends Node.
  • An Element contains a list of children Nodes, and has one parent Element. They also have provide a filtered list of child Elements only.

See also