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findElement

Find elements in HTML tree

Description

subtrees = findElement(tree,selector) returns the elements in tree matching the CSS selector.

example

Examples

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Read HTML code from the URL https://www.mathworks.com/help/textanalytics using the webread function.

url = "https://www.mathworks.com/help/textanalytics";
code = webread(url);

Parse the HTML code using htmlTree.

tree = htmlTree(code);

Find all the hyperlinks in the HTML tree using findElement. The hyperlinks are nodes with element name "A".

selector = "A";
subtrees = findElement(tree,selector);

View the first few subtrees.

subtrees(1:10)
ans = 
  10×1 htmlTree:

    <A class="skip_link sr-only" href="#content_container">Skip to content</A>
    <A href="https://www.mathworks.com?s_tid=gn_logo" class="svg_link navbar-brand"><IMG src="/images/responsive/global/pic-header-mathworks-logo.svg" class="mw_logo" alt="MathWorks"/></A>
    <A href="https://www.mathworks.com/products.html?s_tid=gn_ps">Products</A>
    <A href="https://www.mathworks.com/solutions.html?s_tid=gn_sol">Solutions</A>
    <A href="https://www.mathworks.com/academia.html?s_tid=gn_acad">Academia</A>
    <A href="https://www.mathworks.com/support.html?s_tid=gn_supp">Support</A>
    <A href="https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/?s_tid=gn_mlc">Community</A>
    <A href="https://www.mathworks.com/company/events.html?s_tid=gn_ev">Events</A>
    <A href="https://www.mathworks.com/products/get-matlab.html?s_tid=gn_getml">Get MATLAB</A>
    <A href="https://www.mathworks.com?s_tid=gn_logo" class="svg_link pull-left"><IMG src="/images/responsive/global/pic-header-mathworks-logo.svg" class="mw_logo" alt="MathWorks"/></A>

Extract the text from the subtrees using extractHTMLText. The result contains the link text from each link on the page.

str = extractHTMLText(subtrees);
str(1:10)
ans = 10×1 string
    "Skip to content"
    ""
    "Products"
    "Solutions"
    "Academia"
    "Support"
    "Community"
    "Events"
    "Get MATLAB"
    ""

Input Arguments

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HTML tree, specified as a scalar htmlTree object.

CSS selector, specified as a string scalar or a character vector. For more information, see CSS Selectors.

Output Arguments

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Matching HTML subtrees, returned as an htmlTree array.

More About

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References

Version History

Introduced in R2018b