Process HTML with XSLT Using TagSoup
Use TSaxon, a variant of Saxon, and TagSoup to help transform HTML.
Stylesheets written in XSLT are the standard method of taking XML documents in one format and transforming them into HTML, XML documents in a different format, XHTML, or plain-text documents.
There are many XSLT processors. Michael Kay’s Saxon Version 6.5.3 (http://saxon.sourceforge.net/#F6.5.3) is a particularly mature and successful implementation for XSLT 1.0 and XPath 1.0. It is packaged as a Java JAR file called saxon.jar. You can download this JAR with the 6.5.3 distribution from the Saxon site on Sourceforge.
Now suppose, for example, that we want to extract just the header
elements (h1
, h2
,
h3
, etc.) from an XHTML document and display them
as progressively indented plain text (i.e., each
h1
element is unindented, each
h2
element is indented by a single space,
h2
by two spaces, etc.).
The XSLT stylesheet outline.xsl does exactly
what we want. It specifies an output method of text, and matches the
h1
through h6
elements in the
XHTML input, taking the content of each one and prepending the
correct number of spaces. The textual content of other elements is
suppressed.
The following command, executed in your working directory, will process outline.xsl and the XHTML document outline.xhtml using Saxon and will display the resulting indented plain text:
java -jar saxon.jar outline.xhtml outline.xsl
It so happens that outline.html contains only
h1
, h2
, and
h3
elements (borrowed ...
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