I am having trouble getting content from a single span class that has the same name as others. In my previous attempts, it gave me content I did not want from other span classes in addition. I found a solution that works but that I do not believe is sturdy enough.

So first I connect:

Document doc = Jsoup.connect("https://www.imdb.com/list/ls005750764/").get();

Then I select a class:

Elements rating = doc.select("div.ipl-rating-star.small");

This class contains 2 span classes, one of which I want, which is:

"span.ipl-rating__star"

The other span classes are outside of "div.ipl-rating-star.small", so there is no recurrences of the tag name from my program. Here I am adding the content to an array list.

Add to array list:

for(Element g: rating) {
    ratings.add(g.getElementsByTag("span").text());
}

When I print the contents of the array list I get exactly what I want, more importantly it is only coming from the span class I want it to come from because parsing is forced to stay within the div class I selected.

My main concern now is the other span class within this div class because the program is somehow not getting confused with that even though both the tags are span. Any ideas on this would be helpful.

I managed to get the star ratings with:

doc.select("div[class^=\"ipl-rating-star small\"]").select("span[class=\"ipl-rating-star__rating\"]").text().split(" ")

This returns a String[] which has the star ratings you're after.

pls check the docs for some good examples to copy from: https://jsoup.org/cookbook/extracting-data/dom-navigation