Extract URL from href-tag in groovy

Question

I need to parse a malformed HTML-page and extract certain URLs from it as any kind of Collection. I don't really care what kind of Collection, I just need to be able to iterate over it. Let's say we have a structure like this: ```

Google-Link Blah blah

Youtube-Link Blah blah2

``` And here is what I do so far: ``` // tagsoup version 1.2 is under apache license 2.0 @Grab(group='org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup', module='tagsoup', version='1.2' ) XmlSlurper slurper = new XmlSlurper(new org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup.Parser()); GPathResult nodes = slurper.parse("test.html"); def links = nodes."**".findAll { it.@class == "inner" } println links ``` I want something like…

Accepted Answer

As The Trav says, you need to grab the `href` attribute from each matching `a` tag.

You've edited your question so the `class` bit in the `findAll` makes no sense, but with the current HTML example, this should work:

```
def links = nodes.'**'.findAll { it.name() == 'a' }*.@href*.text()
```

Edit

If (as you say after the edit) you just want the first `a` inside anything marked with `class="inner"`, then try:

```
def links = nodes.'**'.findAll { it.@class?.text() == 'inner' }
                 .collect { d -> d.'**'.find { it.name() == 'a' }?.@href }
                 .findAll() // remove nulls if there are any
```

Extract URL from href-tag in groovy

Solution

Problem