Anuj @ ColdFusion, Flex and some more….

Extracting links from a piece of HTML code is a very common task and any programmer would have come across this requirement at some point. I have always used regular expressions to achieve this and it has always worked for me, no complaints there. However, I was just curious to find some other way to do it.

Here is what I did.

used CFHTTP to get the HTML code.

Put it all in a CF XML Object

Got all links using Xpath

Put everything inside a CF query.

And it works! I was delighted to see the results. However, the only condition is that the HTML should be valid HTML or XHTML I must say. Well, nothing special I know but atleast I found out which people dont have valid HTML on their sites! ha!

I find Xpath very powerul for searching through a XML document. I have used it extensively in some of my projects and it might be worth it to post some of the examples here. For this example, I have used the books.xml sample xml file which can be found here.

Following are some examples of what we can do with Xpath in Coldfusion. I have tried to keep the variable names self-explanatory so it should easy to figure out which statement is doing what. More »