parsing strange html with node.js

Question

I am trying parse a site, but the html is a mess. Can anyone with more experience in parsing sites help me?

<tr>
<td><font FACE=Tahoma color='#CC0000' size=2><b>Date</b></font></td>    
<td><font FACE=Tahoma color='#CC0000' size=2><b>Place</b></font></td>
<td><font FACE=Tahoma color='#CC0000' size=2><b>Situation</b></font></td>
</tr> 

<tr><td rowspan=2>16/09/2011 10:11</td><td>New York</td><td><FONT COLOR="000000">Situation Red</font></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan=2>Optional comment hello new york</td></tr>
<tr><td rowspan=2>16/09/2011 10:08</td><td>Texas</td><td><FONT COLOR="000000">Situation Green</font></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan=2>Optional comment hello texas </td></tr>
<tr><td rowspan=1>06/09/2011 13:14</td><td>California</td><td><FONT COLOR="000000">Yellow Situation</font></td></tr>
</TABLE>

A strange and crazy thing is the comment not in the head of table also the start point(california) dont have comment. So, start point always will be like this:

Date: 06/09/2011 13:14

Place: California

Situation: Yellow Situation

Comment: null

all others places have a comment and will be like this:

Date: 16/09/2011 10:11

Place: New York

Situation: Situation Red

Comment: Optional comment hello new york.

I have tried some approaches, but I don't have much experience with node.js and less with HTML parsing. I need a getting started with parsing crazy stuff.

try: github.com/tautologistics/node-htmlparser

mjc
– mjc

2011-11-07 01:46:41 +00:00
Commented Nov 7, 2011 at 1:46 — mjc
– mjc, Commented Nov 7, 2011 at 1:46

Michael Leaney · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-22 00:04:29Z

I built a distributed scraper in node.js. I found it easier to parse html that had been parsed through html tidy.

Here is a module to run html through tidy:

var spawn = require('child_process').spawn;
var fs = require('fs');

var tidy = (function() {
this.html = function(str, callback) {
    var buffer = '';
    var error = '';

    if (!callback) {
        throw new Error('No callback provided for tidy.html');
    }
    var ptidy = spawn(
        'tidy',
        [
            '--quiet',
            'y',
            '--force-output',
            'y',
            '--bare',
            'y',
            '--break-before-br',
            'y',
            '--hide-comments',
            'y',
            '--output-xhtml',
            'y',
            '--fix-uri',
            'y',
            '--wrap',
            '0'
        ]);

    ptidy.stdout.on('data', function (data) {
        buffer += data;
    });

    ptidy.stderr.on('data', function (data) {
        error += data;
    });

    ptidy.on('exit', function (code) {
        //fs.writeFileSync('last_tidy.html', buffer, 'binary');
        callback(buffer);
    });

    ptidy.stdin.write(str);
    ptidy.stdin.end();      
}
return this;
})();

module.exports = tidy;

Example (if saved as tidy.js):

require('./tidy.js');
tidy.html('<table><tr><td>badly formatted html</tr>', function(html) { console.log(html); });

Result:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy for Linux/x86 (vers 25 March 2009), see www.w3.org" />
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<table>
<tr>
<td>badly formatted html</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

I was able to get this module working using require('htmltidy/htmltidy.js') - just FYI for anyone else who downloads it from npm :-)

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