Java developers are often handed the challenge of consolidating documents in efficient file processing workflows. With this prompt, HTML might not be the first document format that comes to mind — we might think of “file processing” as pertaining to robust, “business-y” formats like PDF or Excel first and foremost — but HTML’s importance in many modern enterprise environments can’t be understated. Whether it’s a question of processing data pulled together from multiple online sources, piecing scraped web pages together, or consolidating custom web-based reports, programmatically combining and packaging HTML content is often highly relevant.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what it means to merge HTML content programmatically, and we’ll point out some of the specific challenges Java developers can expect to encounter in this endeavor. Towards the end, we’ll touch on some open-source libraries and third-party APIs we can use to build HTML merging capabilities into a file processing workflow, carefully weighing the benefits of each approach.