how to get message in Jsoup for a specific tag only in java?

Question

I have such tag in my HTML:

<p class="outter">
  <strong class="inner">not needed message</strong>
  NEEDED MESSAGE
</p>

I'm trying to extract "NEEDED MESSAGE"

but if I do something like this:

String results = document.select("p.outter").text();
System.out.println(results);

it prints :

not needed messageNEEDED MESSAGE

So the question is:

How can I get the text for a specific tag without the text from its inner tags?

Answer 1

One solution could be to select only the TextNode elements. Find below a small snippet.

String html = "<p class=\"outter\">\n"
        + "  <strong class=\"inner\">not needed message</strong>\n"
        + "  NEEDED MESSAGE\n"
        + "</p>";
Document doc = Jsoup.parse(html);
Elements elements = doc.select("p.outter");
for (Element element : elements) {
    // as mentioned by luksch
    System.out.println("ownText = " + element.ownText());

    // or manually based on the node type
    for (Node node : element.childNodes()) {
        if (node instanceof TextNode) {
            System.out.println("node = " + node);
        }
    }
}

output

node =  
node =  NEEDED MESSAGE 

So you need to filter the output based on your requirement. Eg skip empty ones.

Answer 2

You can use ownText() after selecting the paragraph. Example

package com.stackoverflow.answer;

import org.jsoup.Jsoup;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Document;
import org.jsoup.select.Elements;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Element;

public class HtmlParserExample {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String html = "<p class=\"outter\"><strong class=\"inner\">not needed message</strong>NEEDED MESSAGE</p>";
        Document doc = Jsoup.parse(html);
        Elements paragraphs = doc.select("p");
        for (Element p : paragraphs)
            System.out.println(p.ownText());
    }

}

Answer 3

Use Jsoup's ownText () method:

String results = document.select("p.outter").ownText();
System.out.println(results);