July 2004
Intermediate to advanced
479 pages
12h 30m
English
Content preview from XML HacksBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Use Cocoon to Create a Well-Formed View of a Web Page, Then Scrape It for Data
Cocoon is a popular web development framework from Apache.
To an XML hacker, the Web is a frustrating place. Little islands of well-formed XML content are awash in vast seas of “tag soup” in the form of malformed HTML documents [Hack #49] . Using a technique known as screen-scraping, it’s possible to extract information from these pages, relying on knowledge of specific markup practices or document structures to pick out the data items from amongst the presentation elements.
Generally, screen-scraping involves using text processing tools like Perl that ignore the markup completely. However, there are ways to apply screen-scraping techniques using XML tools such as XSLT, the benefit being that one can go a little further with the tools immediately at hand without having to context switch to another environment—good news when you’re after fast results.
This hack will demonstrate how to use elements of Cocoon (http://cocoon.apache.org/), an open source XML processing framework that can create a well-formed view of any web page and then apply XSLT to the results to extract some useful metadata.
Cocoon in 60 Seconds
For the uninitiated, Cocoon is an open source XML processing framework written in Java. It has a loyal community that is continually enhancing its functionality, but at the core is a very simple but powerful design pattern: the pipeline.
A Cocoon pipeline consists of three basic components: a Generator, ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.