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I'm trying to parse an HTML string. This string comes from a Salesforce rich text editor's content. It's a field saved on a record.

String html = '<p>hello<br>goodbye</p>'

String XML_DECLARATION = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>';
Dom.Document document = new Dom.Document();
document.load(XML_DECLARATION + html);

This raises the error:

ERROR: System.XmlException: Failed to parse XML due to: end tag name </p> must match start tag name <br> from line 1

This appears to be because this string is treated as "xhtml+xml" or maybe just "xml" content type, despite the class name being Dom.Document. It's expecitng the <br> tag to have a paired closing tag, or be self closing.

I can do a find and replace on these, but I'm worried about other self closing tags. Is there a way to make the parser handle non-self-closing <br> tags without erroring?

I've tried wrapping the string in <!DOCTYPE HTML><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">...</html> but that didn't have an effect.

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Dom.Document, despite its namespace, is an XML parser. It is not meant to handle <br>, because XML doesn't allow it. You will need to find/replace all <br> with <br/>. Self-closing tags are just fine, e.g. <hr/>, as well as tags that are simply empty of content (<p/>).

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  • Makes sense, and creates a chicken and egg problem of trying to parse xml before using it. For now i'm going to use html.replaceAll('<(hr|br)\\s?>', '<$1 />'));
    – Andy Ray
    Aug 7, 2020 at 18:41

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