From: Paul <tester.paul@...>
Date: 2010-10-06T05:45:15+09:00
Subject: How can I count number of elements in an HTML page

Hi there, I'm using net/http to retrieve some html pages and now I
want to count the number of items in a list on the page.  The
response.body is stored as a string.

The HTML looks something like this:
----
<div class="first section">
   <h1>
      Section Heading I'm interested in:
   </h1>
   <ul>
      <li>
         <form action="foo" method="post" name="">
           <button type="submit">foo</button>
         </form>
      </li>
      <li>
         <form action="bar" method="post" name="">
            <button type="submit">bar</button>
         </form>
      </li>
   </ul>
</div>

<div class="next section">
----

So what I want to do is count the number of li's in a particular div
section.  In this case the answer is 2. It might be more, it might be
0.

I can find the section I want with a regex but I don't know how to
iterate through the string looking for particular elements.  I was
thinking about taking the section I'm interested in and saving it as
an array and then iterating through each array element (html line)
that way, but I thought there might be a quicker way to do it.

suggestions?

TIA