Extracting "data" from HTML -page....

[Tlogist]

Hello!
I'm planning to do a small java-applet which would
for example get temperature from a HTML-page...

How complicated is this to do? I think I need to
get the whole page first on my computer and then search for the temperature (which is in normal textformat) and finally copy it to my applet...?

-TlogisT

 

[AdamRice32]

Hello Tlogist,

That's exactly what you'd need to do. It shouldn't be too difficult a task, either. You can get a stream to any URL, and retrieve the contents of the HTML page into a String. Then you can parse through the String any way you'd like and pull out the appropriate value. The only risk you run there is that the formatting of the HTML could change over time, in which case your applet may not work correctly any more.

Another viable option would be to find a publicly available temperature/weather service via a web protocol like SOAP. You could then connect to the service, make a remote method call, and retrieve the temperature that way.

For more information on SOAP and Java, see:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-soapcl/?dwzone=xml

For a list of publicly available web services, see:

http://www.xmethods.com/

Enjoy,
Adam Rice

 

[Tlogist]

Thank you very much for the information!