Can Swift be used for web scraping on both iOS and macOS platforms?

Yes, Swift can be used for web scraping on both iOS and macOS platforms. While Swift is primarily known as a language for developing applications on Apple's platforms, it also has the capabilities to perform HTTP requests and parse HTML or other data formats, which are the essential tasks in web scraping.

On iOS and macOS, you can use URLSession to perform network requests and retrieve data from the web. For parsing HTML, you might want to use a third-party library like SwiftSoup, which is a Swift port of the popular Java library JSoup.

Here's a simple example of how you might perform a web scraping task using Swift and the SwiftSoup library:

First, you'll need to add SwiftSoup to your project. If you're using Swift Package Manager, you can include it in your Package.swift file:

dependencies: [
    .package(url: "https://github.com/scinfu/SwiftSoup.git", from: "2.3.2")
]

Then, you can write Swift code to fetch web content and parse it:

import Foundation
import SwiftSoup

func scrapeWebsite(urlString: String) {
    guard let url = URL(string: urlString) else {
        print("Invalid URL")
        return
    }

    let task = URLSession.shared.dataTask(with: url) { data, response, error in
        if let error = error {
            print("Error fetching data: \(error)")
            return
        }

        guard let httpResponse = response as? HTTPURLResponse,
              (200...299).contains(httpResponse.statusCode),
              let mimeType = httpResponse.mimeType, mimeType == "text/html",
              let data = data,
              let html = String(data: data, encoding: .utf8) else {
            print("Invalid response or data")
            return
        }

        do {
            let doc: Document = try SwiftSoup.parse(html)
            // Perform your scraping tasks here
            // For example, find all links on the page
            let links: Elements = try doc.select("a")
            for link in links {
                let linkHref: String = try link.attr("href")
                let linkText: String = try link.text()
                print("\(linkText): \(linkHref)")
            }
        } catch Exception.Error(let type, let message) {
            print("Error parsing HTML: \(type) \(message)")
        } catch {
            print("error")
        }
    }

    task.resume()
}

// Use the function to scrape a website
scrapeWebsite(urlString: "https://example.com")

Please note that web scraping should be done responsibly and ethically. Always check the website's robots.txt file to see if scraping is allowed, and make sure to comply with the website's terms of service. Heavy scraping can lead to IP bans or legal actions, so it's important to use web scraping for legitimate purposes and avoid causing harm to the website's service.

It's also worth noting that web scraping on iOS may be subject to additional constraints due to app sandboxing and App Store guidelines, so be sure to review those guidelines if you plan to distribute an app that includes web scraping features.