Thread: HTML Parsing

Hi folks, I'm trying to parse some HTML using the Jsoup 3rd party library but I seem to be getting a nasty exception everytime I try running the program. (for reasons unbeknown to me)

import java.io.File;
import org.jsoup.Jsoup;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Document;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Element;
import org.jsoup.select.Elements;
 
 
 
 
 
 
public class FileHtmlParser{
 
	public String input;
 
 
	//constructor
	public FileHtmlParser(String inputFile){input = inputFile;}
 
 
	//methods
	public FileHtmlParser execute(){
 
		File file = new File(input);
                System.out.println("The file can be read: " + file.canRead());
 
 
		Document doc = Jsoup.parse(input, "UTF-8");
 
		Element content = doc.getElementById("navbar");
		if(content.hasText()){System.out.println("result is " + content.text());}
		else System.out.println("nothing!");
 
		return this;
	}
 
}/*endOfClass*/

public class Prog {
 
 
 
 
	public static void main(String args []){
 
 
		FileHtmlParser fhp = new FileHtmlParser("src/resulthtml.html");
		fhp.execute();
 
 
 
	}
 
}

The HTML file that I'm working with is just a random IMDB page which I downloaded (Airheads (1994) - IMDb) and the message from the console is the following:

The file can be read: true
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
at FileHtmlParser.execute(FileHtmlParser.java:31)
at Prog.main(Prog.java:11)


If anyone can shine some light on this, I would be most grateful.

You will get a NullPointerException whenever you use a variable, method (, or other expression) as if it had a non null value when it is really null. Commonly such usage involves array access with [] or the "dot" operator. For example:

String[] foo;
foo[42] = "?"; // bad []! foo is null
 
foo = new String[666];
System.out.println(foo[42].length()); // bad dot! foo[42] is null
 
foo[42] = "?"
System.out.println(foo[42].length()); // success!

In the line "if(content.hasText()){System.out.println("res ult is " + content.text());" the only thing you use the "dot" operator on is content. So my guess would be that content is null. You can check this with:

Element content = doc.getElementById("navbar");
System.out.println("About to get the content: content=" + content);
if(content.hasText()){System.out.println("result is " + content.text());}
else System.out.println("nothing!");

Once (or if) you verify that content is the culprit you have to figure out why doc.getElementById() returned null. This may involve checking the API docs for getElementById() to see under what conditions it returns null.