finding a node which matches an Xpath

[Bill Carter]

I need to be able to locate an HTMLParser node which matches an Xpath expression. A typical expression looks like this;

/Document[@title='My Web Page']
  /Html[1]
    /Body[1]
      /Paragraph[1]
        /Image[2]

As far as I can tell HTMLParser has no concept of Xpath. Does anyone have a suggestion as to how to go about this?

[Dan]

I started working on something like this a while back, but didn't quite finish.

True, HTMLParser has no concept of XPath.  So what I did was write an ANTLR grammar for a subset of XPath that HTMLParser's NodeFilters could support.  My grammar included Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) generation that could be used by some utility classes to generate the NodeFilter structures.  I then used ANTLR to generate a parser for my expression language, and wrote the aforementioned utility classes.

I got as far as that before other tasks took precedence, and I was unable to finish testing my creation.  But it does sound like you wanted something similar.

-Dan