SwiftSoup is a pure Swift library for working with real-world HTML, modeled after the popular JSoup library for Java. It provides a convenient API for extracting and manipulating data, using the best of DOM, CSS, and jquery-like methods.
To retrieve text from an element using SwiftSoup, you need to follow these steps:
- Parse the HTML to create a
Documentobject. - Use selectors to find the element you're interested in.
- Extract the text content from the element.
Here's a step-by-step example of how you might do this in a Swift project:
import SwiftSoup
let html = "<html><head><title>First parse</title></head>"
+ "<body><p>Parsed HTML into a doc.</p></body></html>"
do {
// Parse the HTML string into a Document.
let doc: Document = try SwiftSoup.parse(html)
// Use a CSS selector to find the element (in this case, a <p> tag).
if let pElement: Element = try doc.select("p").first() {
// Extract the text from the element.
let text = try pElement.text()
print(text) // Output: Parsed HTML into a doc.
}
} catch Exception.Error(let type, let message) {
print("Type: \(type)")
print("Message: \(message)")
} catch {
print("error")
}
In this example, we start by importing the SwiftSoup library and then create an HTML string that we want to parse. We use SwiftSoup's parse method to turn this into a Document object. Then, we use the select method to find the first <p> tag in the document. Finally, we use the text method to extract the text content from this element.
Please note that error handling is important when working with SwiftSoup, as many operations can throw exceptions. The do-catch blocks in the example handle these potential exceptions.
Remember that this code needs to run in an environment where SwiftSoup is available, so you should add it to your project's dependencies, usually via Swift Package Manager, CocoaPods, or Carthage.
To add SwiftSoup via Swift Package Manager, you would modify your Package.swift file to include:
dependencies: [
.package(url: "https://github.com/scinfu/SwiftSoup.git", from: "2.3.2")
]
Make sure to use the latest version of SwiftSoup available at the time you are adding the package.
