Read data from a html page in Swift - html

Question

I want to code an app which shows you the data of a specific HTML-Page.
How can read the text e.g. in a div and turn that text into a String? How can I search something on that page or look in the row of a table?

Answer 1

You need mind what is the step you need to complete this task.
First need load html page data
After find what do you need with parser.
In the first step I found this code
let url = NSURL(string: "http://www.stackoverflow.com")
let task = NSURLSession.sharedSession().dataTaskWithURL(url!) {(data, response, error) in
println(NSString(data: data, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding))
}
task.resume()
Example from this link How to make an HTTP request in Swift?
Look this example, you do a request and return a data, this data need be String. After received data you need parse to findo what do you want.
Second step you need tools to execute, the simple way is do with string methods like slipt. If you need something more smart I recommend Regular Expression
Simple example for split (swift 1.2)
var fullName = "First Last"
var fullNameArr = split(fullName) {$0 == " "}
var firstName: String = fullNameArr[0]
var lastName: String? = fullNameArr.count > 1 ? fullNameArr[1] : nil
example (swift 2.0)
let fullName = "First Last"
let fullNameArr = split(fullName.characters){$0 == " "}.map(String.init)
fullNameArr[0] // First
fullNameArr[1] // Last
Examples from Swift: Split a String into an array
This link is good about Regular Expression, mind it is a powerfull tool to parse, with this you can search anything in your html.
NSRegularExpression Tutorial: Getting Started
I hope helped you with this explanation.

Answer 2

Updated syntax (swift 5) with a few modifications to get html data:
let url = NSURL(string: "https://www.stackoverflow.com")
let task = URLSession.shared.dataTask(with: url! as URL) {(data, response, error) in
if data != nil { // otherwise will crash for if url is empty
let dataString = NSString(data: data!, encoding: String.Encoding.utf8.rawValue)!
print("url data:",dataString)
} else {print("url data not found")}
}
task.resume()