elisp: Parsing HTML/XML
31.26 Parsing HTML and XML
==========================
When Emacs is compiled with libxml2 support, the following functions are
available to parse HTML or XML text into Lisp object trees.
-- Function: libxml-parse-html-region start end &optional base-url
discard-comments
This function parses the text between START and END as HTML, and
returns a list representing the HTML “parse tree”. It attempts to
handle real-world HTML by robustly coping with syntax mistakes.
The optional argument BASE-URL, if non-‘nil’, should be a string
specifying the base URL for relative URLs occurring in links.
If the optional argument DISCARD-COMMENTS is non-‘nil’, then the
parse tree is created without any comments.
In the parse tree, each HTML node is represented by a list in which
the first element is a symbol representing the node name, the
second element is an alist of node attributes, and the remaining
elements are the subnodes.
The following example demonstrates this. Given this (malformed)
HTML document:
<html><head></head><body width=101><div class=thing>Foo<div>Yes
A call to ‘libxml-parse-html-region’ returns this DOM (document
object model):
(html nil
(head nil)
(body ((width . "101"))
(div ((class . "thing"))
"Foo"
(div nil
"Yes"))))
-- Function: shr-insert-document dom
This function renders the parsed HTML in DOM into the current
buffer. The argument DOM should be a list as generated by
‘libxml-parse-html-region’. This function is, e.g., used by 
EWW (eww)Top.
-- Function: libxml-parse-xml-region start end &optional base-url
discard-comments
This function is the same as ‘libxml-parse-html-region’, except
that it parses the text as XML rather than HTML (so it is stricter
about syntax).
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