Parse HTML data in Java including &lt and &gt tags?

I want to parse HTML text in Java.

I have tried to parse HTML data using javax.swing.text.html.HTMLEditorKit. It helped me to get data from HTML. But I have a HTML data like -

&lt;span class="TitleServiceChange" &gt;Service Change&lt;/span&gt;
                    &lt;span class="DateStyle"&gt;
                    &amp;nbsp;Posted:&amp;nbsp;12/16/2012&amp;nbsp; 8:00PM
                    &lt;/span&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
                  &lt;P&gt;

with surrounding '&lt' and '&gt' instead of '<' and '>'

While parsing the above text I am getting the error -

Parsing error: start.missing body ? ? at

Please suggest me to resolve my problem. Thanks in advance.

Solution

For unescaping the full set of escaped characters included at a string, you could make use of the Apache Commons Lang utility library.

Specifically, using the StringEscapeUtils class, where you can find the unescapeHtml4 method, among others.