[jira] [Created] (NUTCH-2318) Text extraction in HtmlParser adds too much whitespace.

["Felix Zett (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Felix Zett created NUTCH-2318:
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             Summary: Text extraction in HtmlParser adds too much whitespace.
                 Key: NUTCH-2318
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NUTCH-2318
             Project: Nutch
          Issue Type: Bug
          Components: parser
    Affects Versions: 2.3.1
            Reporter: Felix Zett


In parse-html, org.apache.nutch.parse.html.HtmlParser will call DOMContentUtils.getText() to extract the text content. For every text node encountered in the document, the getTextHelper() function will first add a space character to the already extracted text and then the text content itself (stripped of excess whitespace). This means that parsing HTML such as

{{<p>behavi<em>ou</em>r</p>}}

will lead to this extracted text:

{{behavi ou r}}

I would have expected a parser not to add whitespace to content that visually (and actually) does not contain any in the first place. This applies to all similar semantic tags as well as {{<span>}}.

My naiive approach would be to remove the lines {{text = text.trim()}} and {{sb.append(' ')}}, but I'm aware that this will lead to bad parsing of stuff like {{<p>foo</p><p>bar</p>}}.

This is not an issue in parse-tika, since tika removes all "unimportant" tags beforehand. However, I'd like to keep using parse-html because I need to keep the document reasonably intact for parse filters applied later.

I know I could write a parse filter that will re-extract the text content, but this feels like a bug (or at least a shortcoming) in the ParseHtml.



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