Exception while converting HTML to PDF: Failed to parse URL

Aspose.HTML Product Family
1

Hello,

I’m getting this exception when I convert an HTML to PDF with an invalid “href” attribute. The sample is very simple:

<html>
<body>
<p>Sample Text</p>
<a href="http://">Broken Link</a>
</body>
</html>

Exception:

Exception in thread "main" com.aspose.html.utils.ar: Failed to parse URL: http://
	at com.aspose.html.utils.Y.a(Unknown Source)
	at com.aspose.html.utils.Y.i(Unknown Source)
	at com.aspose.html.Url.<init>(Unknown Source)
	at com.aspose.html.rendering.pdf.PdfDevice.b(Unknown Source)
	at com.aspose.html.rendering.pdf.PdfDevice.beginElement(Unknown Source)
	at com.aspose.html.utils.amR.n(Unknown Source)
	at com.aspose.html.utils.amR.a(Unknown Source)
	at com.aspose.html.utils.amR.a(Unknown Source)

I understand why it fails because the URL is not valid. But it would be nice if Aspose HTML could be more forgiving in terms of parsing URLs. Instead of throwing an exception, it could render a broken link or something like this. We have seen real HTML emails created by Outlook with such links.

OS: Windows 11
Java version: tried 21.075 64-bit
Aspose HTML 25.7

Sample code and the sample HTML file: samples.zip (617 Bytes)

2

@igor.rogov

Cause

The exception you’re encountering occurs because the URL in the href attribute (http://) is not valid. Aspose HTML is strict about URL parsing and raises an exception when it encounters malformed URLs.

Solution

To handle this situation gracefully, you can implement a check in your code to validate URLs before attempting to convert the HTML to PDF. If the URL is invalid, you can either remove the link or replace it with a placeholder.

Code

Here’s a simple Java code snippet that demonstrates how to validate the URL before conversion:

import com.aspose.html.HTMLDocument;
import com.aspose.html.rendering.pdf.PdfDevice;
import com.aspose.html.utils.Url;

public class HtmlToPdfConverter {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String htmlContent = "<html><body><p>Sample Text</p><a href=\"http://\">Broken Link</a></body></html>";
        
        // Validate URLs in the HTML content
        if (isValidUrl("http://")) {
            convertHtmlToPdf(htmlContent);
        } else {
            System.out.println("Invalid URL detected. Please correct the link.");
        }
    }

    private static boolean isValidUrl(String url) {
        try {
            new Url(url);
            return true;
        } catch (Exception e) {
            return false;
        }
    }

    private static void convertHtmlToPdf(String htmlContent) {
        // Conversion logic here
        HTMLDocument document = new HTMLDocument(htmlContent);
        PdfDevice pdfDevice = new PdfDevice();
        pdfDevice.render(document);
        // Save or process the PDF as needed
    }
}

Next Steps

  1. Implement the URL validation logic in your application.
  2. Test with various HTML inputs to ensure that your application can handle both valid and invalid URLs.
  3. Consider logging or notifying users about invalid links for better user experience.

If you have any further questions or need additional assistance, feel free to ask!