Jsoup selector on RSS <link> tag returns empty string with .text() method

Question

I\'m using jsoup to parse an rss feed using java. I\'m having problems getting a result when trying to select the first element in the document.

Answer 1

Refer here. Jsoup added this XmlParser.

try {
    String xml = "<rss></rss><channel></channel><link>http://www.the.blog/category</link><title>The Blog Title</title>";
    Document doc = Jsoup.parse(xml, "", Parser.xmlParser());

    Element title = doc.select("title").first();
    System.out.println(title.text());

    Element link = doc.select("link").first();
    System.out.println(link.text());
} catch (Exception e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

Answer 2

Your rss feed is XML, not HTML. For this to work, you must tell JSoup to use its XMLParser. This will work:

String rss = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>"
  +"<rss><channel>"
  +  "<title>The Blog Title</title>"
  +  "<link>http://www.the.blog/category</link>"
  +"</channel></rss>";

Document doc = Jsoup.parse(rss, "", Parser.xmlParser());

Element link = doc.select("rss channel link").first();
System.out.println(link.text()); // prints empty string

Explanation:

The link tag in HTML follows a different format and Jsoup tries to interpret the <link> of your rss as such html tag.