htmlcxx - html and css APIs for C++

Description

htmlcxx is a simple non-validating css1 and html parser for C++. Although there are several other html parsers available, htmlcxx has some characteristics that make it unique:

STL like navigation of DOM tree, using excelent's tree.hh library from Kasper Peeters
It is possible to reproduce exactly, character by character, the original document from the parse tree
Bundled css parser
Optional parsing of attributes
C++ code that looks like C++ (not so true anymore)
Offsets of tags/elements in the original document are stored in the nodes of the DOM tree
The parsing politics of htmlcxx were created trying to mimic mozilla firefox (http://www.mozilla.org) behavior. So you should expect parse trees similar to those create by firefox. However, differently from firefox, htmlcxx does not insert non-existent stuff in your html. Therefore, serializing the DOM tree gives exactly the same bytes contained in the original HTML document.

News for version 0.85

Fixed gcc 4.3 compiler errors, several minor bug fixes, improved distribution of the css library.

News for version 0.7.3

Added utility code to escape/decode urls as defined by RFC 2396. Added new SAX interface. The API was slightly broken to support the new SAX interface :-(. Added Visual Studio 2003 projects for the WIN32 port.

Examples

Using htmlcxx is quite simple. Take a look at this example.

  #include <htmlcxx/html/ParserDom.h>
  ...
  
  //Parse some html code
  string html = "<html><body>hey</body></html>";
  HTML::ParserDom parser;
  tree<HTML::Node> dom = parser.parseTree(html);
  
  //Print whole DOM tree
  cout << dom << endl;
  
  //Dump all links in the tree
  tree<HTML::Node>::iterator it = dom.begin();
  tree<HTML::Node>::iterator end = dom.end();
  for (; it != end; ++it)
  {
  	if (it->tagName() == "A")
  	{
  		it->parseAttributes();
  		cout << it->attributes("href");
  	}
  }
  
  //Dump all text of the document
  it = dom.begin();
  end = dom.end();
  for (; it != end; ++it)
  {
  	if ((!it->isTag()) && (!it->isComment()))
  	{
  		cout << it->text();
  	}
  }

The htmlcxx application

htmlcxx is the name of both the library and the utility application that comes with this package. Although the htmlcxx (the application) is mostly useless for programming, you can use it to easily see how htmlcxx (the library) would parse your html code. Just install and try htmlcxx -h.

Downloads

Use the project page at sourceforge: http://sf.net/projects/htmlcxx

License Stuff

Code is now under the LGPL. This was our initial intention, and is now possible thanks to the author of tree.hh, who allowed us to use it under LGPL only for HTML::Node template instances. Check http://www.fsf.org or the COPYING file in the distribution for details about the LGPL license. The uri parsing code is a derivative work of Apache web server uri parsing routines. Check www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 or the ASF-2.0 file in the distribution for details.

Enjoy!

Davi de Castro Reis - <davi (a) users sf net>

Robson Braga Araújo - <braga (a) users sf net>

Last Updated: Thu Mar 24 00:56:09 2005