jsoup: Java HTML Parser

jsoup is a Java library for working with real-world HTML. It provides a very convenient API for extracting and manipulating data, using the best of DOM, CSS, and jquery-like methods.

jsoup implements the WHATWG HTML5 specification, and parses HTML to the same DOM as modern browsers do.

  • scrape and parse HTML from a URL, file, or string
  • find and extract data, using DOM traversal or CSS selectors
  • manipulate the HTML elements, attributes, and text
  • clean user-submitted content against a safe white-list, to prevent XSS attacks
  • output tidy HTML

jsoup is designed to deal with all varieties of HTML found in the wild; from pristine and validating, to invalid tag-soup; jsoup will create a sensible parse tree.


Fetch the Wikipedia homepage, parse it to a DOM, and select the headlines from the In the news section into a list of Elements (online sample):

Document doc = Jsoup.connect("http://en.wikipedia.org/").get();
Elements newsHeadlines = doc.select("#mp-itn b a");

Open source

jsoup is an open source project distributed under the liberal MIT license. The source code is available at GitHub.

Getting started

  1. Download the jsoup jar (version 1.7.3)
  2. Read the cookbook introduction
  3. Enjoy!

Development and support

If you have any questions on how to use jsoup, or have ideas for future development, please get in touch via the mailing list.

If you find any issues, please file a bug after checking for duplicates.


jsoup is in general release.