Hi all.
I'm a second year soft ware engineering student and we've been given an assignment in network programming. The assignment specification is to take a URL as a command line argument, download it scorce, examine all it's links and finally, print out a summary of how many broken links occurred.
I've only just started this and I have a problem. I'm un-sure as to how I would find out weather a piece of HTML is actually a link or not. Our lecturer gave us a link to this example.
http://www.exampledepot.com/egs/java.../GetLinks.html
Now I've never done network programming before and this seems very hard to understand to me as the writer didn't comment the code or list the packages he used. Could anyone give me a brief explanation of how I would test a page to find links.??
I've been able to figure out how to read in a url and print out it's scorce without any problem and I've included this code below.
Thanks
.
//THIS IS JUST A TEST!!!!!!!!
import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
public class WebProject
{
public static void main(String [] args)
{
List links = new ArrayList(); //will be used to store any links
try
{
URL address = new URL(args[0]); //take in the url to be searched from args
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(address.openStream())); //open up a "link" to the url
PrintWriter myFile = new PrintWriter("output.HTML"); //create a printwroter to write the contents to a file, output.html
String input = "";
while((input = in.readLine()) != null) //continue while the is still data to read
{
myFile.println(input); //print out what has just been read
}
in.close(); //close the link
myFile.close(); //close and save output
}
catch(MalformedURLException e)
{
System.out.println("Error!!, the supplied URL doesn't exist. "); //an error message
System.out.println(args[0]);
}
catch(IOException e)
{
System.out.println("Error!!, data handeling problem"); //another warning message
}
}
}