QDomDocument fails to set content of an HTML document with <!doctype> tag

3.4k Views Asked by Alireza Mirian At 06 November 2025 at 05:42

When I use QDomDocument with HTML content, it fails to set content if there is a <!doctype html> at the beginning of the document. But actually why?! for example consider the following snippet of code:

 QDomDocument doc;
 QString content = "<!doctype html><html><body><a href='bar'>foo</a></body></html>";
 qDebug() << doc.setContent(content,false,0,0);
 QDomElement docElem = doc.documentElement();
 QDomNode a = docElem.firstChild();
 qDebug() << doc.childNodes().size() << docElem.childNodes().size();

nothing but a list of falses are the output of this code!

Original Q&A

There are 2 best solutions below

Troubadour On 11 August 2012 at 22:55

Use the optional arguments to setContent to find out what the parsing error is. It could be something as simple as the case of "doctype".

air-dex On 12 August 2012 at 00:14

HTML is HTML and XML is XML. Consequently, Qt XML is not able to parse HTML code correctly. To parse HTML files, consider using the Qt Webkit module instead of the Qt XML module. To include it in your project, you just have to add QT += webkit in your project file.

To parse your HTML datas, you will have to do something like this :

QString content = "<html><body><a href='bar'>foo</a></body></html>";
QWebPage webPage;
QWebFrame * frame = webPage.mainFrame();
frame->setHtml(content);
QWebElement htmlElement = frame->documentElement();    // Equivalent of the QDomElement

For further informations, see the Qt Webkit documentation and the QWebElement documentation.

QDomDocument fails to set content of an HTML document with <!doctype> tag

There are 2 best solutions below

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