CDATA fields are lost after calling Jsoup.parse

First, congratulations to your great library - it’s awesome! However we’re having an issue that got us in serious trouble. I’ll explain our scenario:

We’re running a Search/Replace mechanism on many pages of a CMS. The content of the pages is XHTML. The basic scheme we’re doing for each page is

String xhtml = page.getBody();
Document document = Jsoup.parse(xhtml, "", Parser.xmlParser());
// remove some content from document ...
page.setBody(document.text());

The big problem is that there is a lot of content that looks like

<some-node><![CDATA[some.string.content=content]]></some-node>

As soon as we call Jsoup.parse, the CDATA tag is gone and text() will produce this

<some-node>some.string.content=content></some-node>

What we have afterwards is a page with corrupt content.

We’d be very glad about some help, since we really enjoy using Jsoup otherwise!

[jonada]

I had the exact same challenge with Confluence as @ataraxie. If it helps anyone else, I ended up writing a helper function that restores the CDATA section. Perhaps not the prettiest solution, but it fulfilled my needs.

import org.springframework.web.util.HtmlUtils;

/**
 * Restores plain text in HTML to it's CDATA equivalent.
 * For example, jsoup parses CDATA section and returns HTML escaped string. This function restores it.
 * This is a 
 * 
 * @param html The html code
 * @param tag The enclosing tag of the text that shall be restored.
 * @return
 */
public static String restoreCDATA(String html, String tag) {
    int startIdx;
    int endIdx;
    String startTag = "<" + tag + ">";
    String endTag = "</" + tag + ">";

    // 1. Find next occurrence
    startIdx = html.indexOf(startTag);
    while (startIdx >= 0) {

        // 2. Find end boundary
        endIdx = html.indexOf(endTag, startIdx);
        if (endIdx < 0) break;

        // 3. Replace with "unescaped" text
        startIdx += startTag.length();
        html = html.substring(0, startIdx) + "<![CDATA[" + HtmlUtils.htmlUnescape(html.substring(startIdx, endIdx)) + "]]>" + html.substring(endIdx, html.length());

        // 5. Repeat for all occurrences
        startIdx = html.indexOf(startTag, endIdx + endTag.length());
    }
    return html;
}

[saiyinleung]

My use case I have a page that contains CDATA I used jsoup to parse and update some other tags. Pass along the updated page (toString()) But all the CDATA are gone… which is not what I desired…

Because of this, I simply have to give up using jsoup.