Web crawler app using QWebPage

[JohanSolo]

@p3c0 said:Then the usual stuff of parsing the HTML (an HTML is an XML). To do it you can use either >QXmlStreamReader or QDomDocument. Each one has advantages of it own.

Well, HTML is not necessarily XML, if you're lucky, the downloaded page is XHTML and it's a win. But if the page is HTML where tags are either not nested correctly nor properly closed, your XML parser will most probably yell at you that the document contains syntax errors I'm afraid...

[jelicicm]

@p3c0 I can't believe this, I never called doDownload(), and I wonder why it doesn't download. Stupid, stupid..

I created a QFile, and managed to save some page to it. When I open it, everything looks good, and it seems to me that the download works fine. I saved it as .html, and managed to open it nicely.

However, I'm still not sure that my QXmlStreamReader buffer object is good. I tried printing all of it withui->plainTextEdit->appendPlainText(xml->text().toString());, but after "debug" nothing gets printed?!

[p3c0]

@jelicicm Is the print slot called ?

[jelicicm]

@p3c0 Yes, I have a line that just prints "debug" in my PlainTextEdit field, and that gets printed, but, after that, I want to printout what I have downloaded, and it doesn't work.

[p3c0]

@jelicicm Ok can you make sure it works in replyFinished else part ? Try the same with buffer.

[jelicicm]

@p3c0 I did this in my replyFinished, else part>

        buffer->addData(reply->readAll());

        while(!buffer->atEnd()) {
            qDebug()<<buffer->readNext();
        }

What I get are some weird numbers, that I don't understand..
My qDebug output looks like this

2
8
4
6
4
6
4
6
5
6
4
6
4
6
4
6
4
6
4
5
6
4
5
6
4
5
6
4
5
6
4
5
6
4
5
6
4
5
6
4
5
6
4
1

Web page I was downloading> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150604-the-bravest-walks-ever-taken

[p3c0]

@jelicicm It prints a TokenType and not the text. Since TokenType is an enum what you see are its values. Also text() will not so the same.
You can try to print errorString() to see if there are any errors.
Since readNext prints something it means the there's data in it.
There are few examples on forums where you can see how to parse the XML using QXmlStreamReader. I would also suggest you to look for htmlinfo example under <QtDir>/xml/htmlinfo installed on your system. Another example would be this. But a more close example will be htmlinfo.

Edited

[jelicicm]

Wow @p3c0 this really helped a lot! Thank you very much!

Currently I have>

void MainWindow::print(QXmlStreamReader *reader)
{
    int paragraphCount = 0;
    QStringList links;
    QString title;
    QString text;

    while (!reader->atEnd()) {
        reader->readNext();
        /*text = reader->readElementText();
        if(text.contains("some text")) {
            qDebug()<<"found text\n";
        }*/
        if (reader->isStartElement()) {
            if (reader->name() == "title")
                title = reader->readElementText();
            else if(reader->name() == "a")
                links.append(reader->attributes().value("href").toString());
            else if(reader->name() == "p")
                ++paragraphCount;
        }
    }
    if (reader->hasError()) {
        ui->plainTextEdit->appendPlainText( "  The HTML file isn't well-formed: " + reader->errorString()+"\n");
        return;
    }

    qDebug()<<"Title: "<<title;
    qDebug()<<"Paragraph count: "<<paragraphCount;
    qDebug()<<"No of links: "<<links.size();
    qDebug()<<"One link: "<<links[3];
}

And, this works perfectly!

However, when I uncomment reader->readElementText();, I always get an error from little lower in the code.

What I'm trying to do is to search for some text in the web page, and I guess that should be done with this function, but I can't get it to work.

[p3c0]

@jelicicm As the readElementText doc states:

Convenience function to be called in case a StartElement was read. Reads until the corresponding EndElement and returns all text in-between.

It should be used only when StartElement is encountered. Your commented code doesn't do that. The next code shows how it should be done.

[jelicicm]

@p3c0 In the meantime I discovered that the problem is in QString text = reader->readElementText();

I just did:

while (!reader->atEnd()) {
        reader->readNext();

        if (reader->isStartElement()) {
            text = reader->readElementText();
            qDebug()<<text;
}

    if (reader->hasError()) {
        ui->plainTextEdit->appendPlainText( "  The HTML file isn't well-formed: " + reader->errorString()+"\n");
        return;
    }

And, it always prints out: The HTML file isn't well-formed: Expected character data.
qDebug just prints
"

"
It doesnt even make a difference if I put this in or not.

if (reader->name() == "title")
                title = reader->readElementText();
            else if(reader->name() == "a")
                links.append(reader->attributes().value("href").toString());
            else if(reader->name() == "p")
                ++paragraphCount;

For a moment I thought that reader is emptied after reading text, but thats not it.

[p3c0]

@jelicicm After some analysis I'm to unsure about the detailed working of it.
However QXmlStreamReader can help you in extracting the links which you can probably use in your web crawler implemention as shown in that example.
Also to implement something as simple as searching you can instead resort to QTextStream. Set the html content as byte array to it. The iterate over it, extract the line and check if the particular word exists in it using QString::contains.