I want my Java application to write HTML code in a file. Right now, I am hard coding HTML tags using java.io.BufferedWriter class. For Example:
BufferedWrite
Templates and other methods based on preliminary creation of the document in memory are likely to impose certain limits on resulting document size.
Meanwhile a very straightforward and reliable write-on-the-fly approach to creation of plain HTML exists, based on a SAX handler and default XSLT transformer, the latter having intrinsic capability of HTML output:
String encoding = "UTF-8";
FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream("myfile.html");
OutputStreamWriter writer = new OutputStreamWriter(fos, encoding);
StreamResult streamResult = new StreamResult(writer);
SAXTransformerFactory saxFactory =
(SAXTransformerFactory) TransformerFactory.newInstance();
TransformerHandler tHandler = saxFactory.newTransformerHandler();
tHandler.setResult(streamResult);
Transformer transformer = tHandler.getTransformer();
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.METHOD, "html");
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.ENCODING, encoding);
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
writer.write("<!DOCTYPE html>\n");
writer.flush();
tHandler.startDocument();
tHandler.startElement("", "", "html", new AttributesImpl());
tHandler.startElement("", "", "head", new AttributesImpl());
tHandler.startElement("", "", "title", new AttributesImpl());
tHandler.characters("Hello".toCharArray(), 0, 5);
tHandler.endElement("", "", "title");
tHandler.endElement("", "", "head");
tHandler.startElement("", "", "body", new AttributesImpl());
tHandler.startElement("", "", "p", new AttributesImpl());
tHandler.characters("5 > 3".toCharArray(), 0, 5); // note '>' character
tHandler.endElement("", "", "p");
tHandler.endElement("", "", "body");
tHandler.endElement("", "", "html");
tHandler.endDocument();
writer.close();
Note that XSLT transformer will release you from the burden of escaping special characters like >
, as it takes necessary care of it by itself.
And it is easy to wrap SAX methods like startElement()
and characters()
to something more convenient to one's taste...
if it is becoming repetitive work ; i think you shud do code reuse ! why dont you simply write functions that "write" small building blocks of HTML. get the idea? see Eg. you can have a function to which you could pass a string and it would automatically put that into a paragraph tag and present it. Of course you would also need to write some kind of a basic parser to do this (how would the function know where to attach the paragraph!). i dont think you are a beginner .. so i am not elaborating ... do tell me if you do not understand..
If you are willing to use Groovy, the MarkupBuilder is very convenient for this sort of thing, but I don't know that Java has anything like it.
http://groovy.codehaus.org/Creating+XML+using+Groovy's+MarkupBuilder
A few months ago I had the same problem and every library I found provides too much functionality and complexity for my final goal. So I end up developing my own library - HtmlFlow - that provides a very simple and intuitive API that allows me to write HTML in a fluent style. Check it here: https://github.com/fmcarvalho/HtmlFlow (it also supports dynamic binding to HTML elements)
Here is an example of binding the properties of a Task
object into HTML elements. Consider a Task
Java class with three properties: Title
, Description
and a Priority
and then we can produce an HTML document for a Task
object in the following way:
import htmlflow.HtmlView;
import model.Priority;
import model.Task;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.PrintStream;
public class App {
private static HtmlView<Task> taskDetailsView(){
HtmlView<Task> taskView = new HtmlView<>();
taskView
.head()
.title("Task Details")
.linkCss("https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.6/css/bootstrap.min.css");
taskView
.body().classAttr("container")
.heading(1, "Task Details")
.hr()
.div()
.text("Title: ").text(Task::getTitle)
.br()
.text("Description: ").text(Task::getDescription)
.br()
.text("Priority: ").text(Task::getPriority);
return taskView;
}
public static void main(String [] args) throws IOException{
HtmlView<Task> taskView = taskDetailsView();
Task task = new Task("Special dinner", "Have dinner with someone!", Priority.Normal);
try(PrintStream out = new PrintStream(new FileOutputStream("Task.html"))){
taskView.setPrintStream(out).write(task);
Desktop.getDesktop().browse(URI.create("Task.html"));
}
}
}