6.2. HTML Filters#

Note

This page is under construction.

HTML is the media type most frequently in need of transformation and canonicalization, as part of a Hash Filter or Crawl Filter. To this end, the LOCKSS software contains a variety of utility classes that can be used as building blocks to construct effective HTML filters.

6.2.1. HtmlFilterInputStream#

The org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlFilterInputStream class is a way to parse an InputStream of HTML content and apply a transform of type org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlNodeFilterTransform to it, resulting in a new InputStream.

The org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlNodeFilterTransform class provides two kinds of transforms, that either filter out all HTML nodes that match a predicate ("exclude transform", very common use pattern) or collect only HTML nodes that match a predicate ("include transform", less common use pattern). The code of the library used to implement org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlFilterInputStream and org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlNodeFilterTransform refers to these predicates as org.htmlparser.NodeFilter.

Whether an "exclude" transform or an "include" transform, most often the predicate is really the union of many smaller predicates, which can be grouped together by the org.htmlparser.filters.OrFilter class (and other similar boolean operators).

Although some complex cases call for the definition of a custom predicate, most typical situations can be handled by predicates predefined in the org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlNodeFilters utility class:

  • org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlNodeFilters.tag(String tag): predicate that matches a tag with the given name. (Many LOCKSS plugins make direct use of the underlying org.htmlparser.filters.TagNameFilter.TagNameFilter(String) class, but using the utility method is recommended.)

  • org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlNodeFilters.tagWithAttribute(String tag, String attr): predicate that matches a tag with the given name, that defines an attribute with the specified key (regardless of the value).

  • org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlNodeFilters.tagWithAttribute(String tag, String attr, String val): predicate that matches a tag with the given name, that defines an attribute with the specified key and value. The variant org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlNodeFilters.divWithAttribute(String attr, String val) assumes a <div> tag.

  • org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlNodeFilters.tagWithAttributeRegex(String tag, String attr, String regex): predicate that matches a tag with the given name, that defines an attribute with the specified key, whose value matches the given regular expression. The variant org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlNodeFilters.tagWithAttributeRegex(String tag, String attr, String regex, boolean ignoreCase) adds a flag for whether the regular expression is case-insensitive.

  • org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlNodeFilters.comment(): predicate that matches any HTML comment.

  • org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlNodeFilters.commentWithString(String str): predicate that matches HTML comments containing the given string. The variant org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlNodeFilters.commentWithString(String str, boolean ignoreCase) adds a flag for whether the test is case-insensitive.

  • org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlNodeFilters.commentWithRegex(String regex): predicate that matches HTML comments matching the given regular expression. The variant org.lockss.filter.html.HtmlNodeFilters.commentWithRegex(String regex, boolean ignoreCase) adds a flag for whether the regular expression is case-insensitive.

6.2.2. WhiteSpaceFilter#

The org.lockss.filter.WhiteSpaceFilter class is a Reader implementation that canonicalizes whitespace by collapsing consecutive whitespace characters to a single one. This is useful because many transformations may leave different numbers of consecutive whitespace characters (perhaps zero) depending on the whitespace surrounding the outermost tags of various removed nodes.

In many LOCKSS plugins, the typical way to use WhiteSpaceFilter is to turn an InputStream into a Reader, apply WhiteSpaceReader, and turn the result back into an InputStream for further processing:

InputStream i1 = ...; // an input stream
String e1 = ...; // the encoding of the input stream
Reader r1 = FilterUtil.getReader(i1, e1);
Reader r2 = new WhiteSpaceFilter(r1);
InputStream i2 = new ReaderInputStream(r2);