Modifying an html tag's own text in Java using JSoup

Question

So yeah, suppose I have this piece of HTML

<p>And finally, how about some <a href="http://www.yahoo.com/">Links?</a></p>

and I want to access and modify the "And finally, how about some" part only, and get this:

<p>new text <a href="http://www.yahoo.com/">Links?</a></p>

I can't seem to figure out how. Here's what I've tried so far:

Document doc = null;
    try {
        doc = Jsoup.connect("http://csb.stanford.edu/class/public/pages/sykes_webdesign/05_simple.html").userAgent("Mozilla").get();
    } catch (IOException e1) {
        e1.printStackTrace();
    }
Elements d = doc.body().children();
Element e = d.get(20); //Assuming the HTML line in question is found at index 20
e.text("new text") //just outputs <p>new value</p>, which is not good for me

It seems that I can access it by

Element e = d.get(20);
System.out.println("\n"+e.ownText()); //outputs: And finally, how about some

but modifying it doesn't work.

Element e = d.get(20);
String s = e.toString().replace(e.ownText(), "new text");
e.text(s);
System.out.println(e.toString());

The output for the code above is

<p>&lt;p&gt;changed &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yahoo.com/&quot;&gt;Links?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</p>

It seems to be taking the tags as literals, but I want them as < or > because I then have to re build the webpage with the new text.

Any kind of help will be hugely appreciated.

Pshemo · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-05 18:30:56Z

1

How about something like

Element e = d.get(20);
e.text("new text"); 
e.append("<a href=\"http://www.yahoo.com/\">Links?</a>");//lets you add HTML.

If link is dynamic and you don't want to change it you can earlier store it and use later

Element e = d.get(20);
Element link = e.child(0);
e.text("new text"); 
e.append(link.toString());

edited Mar 5, 2014 at 18:30

answered Mar 5, 2014 at 18:21

Pshemo

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4 Comments

SHA33 Over a year ago

Not exactly what I was looking for, but your answer kinda gave me an idea. So, your help was indirectly appreciated, thank you. :)

Pshemo Over a year ago

Can I know what solution you ware looking for?

SHA33 Over a year ago

You see, the codes I posted were hardcoded. I used them only to test where I was going wrong. My real aim is to extract texts from a website, to translate those text and rebuild that webpage locally. I'm using a loop whereby I'm extracting children of elements and translating them, but by doing so, I couldn't seem to access the parent-element's own text. Like for eg a list: This is a list: 1. Item A 2. Item B I was only getting: This is a list: (<- which should've been set to "new text") 1. new text A 2. new text B

Pshemo Over a year ago

@SHA33 OK, makes sense. So basically my answer solves problem described in question, but only points you in direction in your real case. I was just wondering if I could answer your question better, but without that additional informations it seems very unlikely.

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