Regex for HTML with java.util.regex

Question

I need a regex for the following html:

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">    <p/>
  <p/><p/>    <p/>
</div>

This comes from the richtext field and obviously this is not meaningful content or means: empty. I cannot say in java: if (richTextConent == null || richTextContent.length == 0) because the richtext field contains something. Semantically, the content above is empty, so I thought about using a regex. I need to map this snippet to java.util.regex

If the fragment has something meaningful:

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> text<p/>
  <p/><p/>text    <p/>
</div>

than regex should not match.

Answer 1

Use an HTML parser like Jsoup .

String html1 = "<div xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml\">    <p/>  <p/><p/>    <p/></div>";
String html2 = "<div xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml\"> text<p/>        <p/><p/>text    <p/>        </div>";

System.out.println(Jsoup.parse(html1).text().isEmpty()); // true
System.out.println(Jsoup.parse(html2).text().isEmpty()); // false

See also:

• (X) HTML ?
• HTML- Java
• Jsoup