clojureenlive

Extracting consecutive html fragments with enlive


I need to scrape html that has the following form:

<div id='content'>
    <h3>Headline1</h3>
    <div>Text1</div>
    <div>Text2</div>
    <div>Text3</div>
    <h3>Headline2</h3>
    <div>Text4</div>
    <div>Text5</div>
    <h3>Headline3</h3>
    <div>Text6</div>
    <div>... and so on ...</div>
</div>

I need to get the content between the headline tags as separate chunks. So from one headline up to the next. Unfortunately there is no container tag for the desired ranges.

I tried the fragment selector {[:h3] [:h3]} but somehow this only returns all h3 tags, without the tags in between them: (({:tag :h3, :attrs nil, :content ("Headline1")}) ({:tag :h3, :attrs nil, :content ("Headline2")}) ({:tag :h3, :attrs nil, :content ("Headline3")}))

What does work, is {[[:h3 (html/nth-of-type 1)]] [[:h3 (html/nth-of-type 2)]]}. This gives me all of the html between the first and second h3-tag. However this does not give me all of the desired chunks with one selector.

Can enlive do this at all or should I resort to a regular expression?

Thanks!


Solution

  • Select out everything in div.content and then partition them base upon tag.

    There is a more general concept here of separating a sequence of things into segments by identifying which things are separators and which are not:

    (defn separate*
      "Produces a sequence of (parent child*)*, coll must start with a parent"
      [child? coll]
      (lazy-seq
       (when-let [s (seq coll)]
         (let [run (cons (first s)
                         (take-while child? (next s)))]
           (cons run (separate* child? (drop (count run) s)))))))
    

    Very similar to partition-by, but always splits on parent:

    (partition-by keyword? [:foo 1 2 3 :bar :baz 4 5])
    ;; => ((:foo) (1 2 3) (:bar :baz) (4 5))
    
    (separate* (compliment keyword?) [:foo 1 2 3 :bar :baz 4 5])
    ;; => ((:foo 1 2 3) (:bar) (:baz 4 5))
    

    If you want to handle when there is no leading title:

    (defn separate
      [parent? coll]
      (when-let [s (seq coll)]
        (if (parent? (first coll))
          (separate* (complement parent?) coll)
          (let [child? (complement parent?)
                run (take-while child? s)]
            (cons (cons nil run)
                  (separate* child? (drop (count run) s)))))))
    
    (separate keyword? [1 2 :foo 3 4])
    ;; => ((nil 1 2) (:foo 3 4))
    

    And returning to the problem at hand:

    (def x [{:tag :h3 :content "1"}
            {:tag :div :content "A"}
            {:tag :div :content "B"}
            {:tag :h3 :content "2"}
            {:tag :div :content "C"}
            {:tag :div :content "D"}])
    
    (def sections (separate #(= :h3 (:tag %)) x))
    => (({:content "1", :tag :h3}
         {:content "A", :tag :div
         {:content "B", :tag :div})
        ({:content "2", :tag :h3}
         {:content "C", :tag :div}
         {:content "D", :tag :div}))
    

    If we don't care to retain the content of the h3 titles:

    (map rest sections)
    => (({:content "A", :tag :div} {:content "B", :tag :div})
        ({:content "C", :tag :div} {:content "D", :tag :div}))