SwiftSoup is a Swift library used for parsing HTML and XML. It's a Swift port of the popular Java library, Jsoup. However, SwiftSoup does not have built-in support for XPath queries. SwiftSoup operates with its own set of DOM traversal and selection APIs, which are inspired by jQuery rather than XPath.
If you're looking to use XPath with Swift, you would need to use a different library that supports XPath queries, such as libxml2 (which is a C library that you can bridge to Swift) or another dedicated Swift XML library with XPath support.
Below is an example of how you would typically select elements with SwiftSoup, using its CSS selector syntax:
import SwiftSoup
let html = "<html><head><title>First parse</title></head>"
+ "<body><p>Parsed HTML into a doc.</p></body></html>"
do {
let doc: Document = try SwiftSoup.parse(html)
let elements = try doc.select("p")
for element in elements {
print(try element.text())
}
} catch Exception.Error(let type, let message) {
print(message)
} catch {
print("error")
}
In the above Swift code, select("p") is a method that uses a CSS selector to find elements. It's similar in concept to jQuery's $ function.
If you specifically need XPath support, you would have to integrate libxml2 into your Swift project or find another library that provides XPath functionality. Here's a simple example of using libxml2 with Swift for XPath queries:
First, make sure to include the libxml2 library in your project and set the header search paths appropriately in your Xcode project settings.
Then, you can use it in your Swift code like this:
import libxml2
let xmlString = "<root><element>value</element></root>"
let doc = xmlReadMemory(xmlString, Int32(xmlString.utf8.count), nil, nil, 0)
let xpathCtx = xmlXPathNewContext(doc)
let xpathObj = xmlXPathEvalExpression("//element", xpathCtx)
if let nodes = xpathObj?.pointee.nodesetval {
var i = 0
while i < nodes.pointee.nodeNr {
let node = nodes.pointee.nodeTab[i]
if let content = xmlNodeGetContent(node) {
print(String(cString: content))
xmlFree(content)
}
i += 1
}
}
xmlXPathFreeObject(xpathObj)
xmlXPathFreeContext(xpathCtx)
xmlFreeDoc(doc)
Remember that working with libxml2 directly in Swift can be quite cumbersome due to the need for manual memory management and the use of unsafe pointers. It's generally recommended to use a higher-level library that wraps libxml2 in a more Swift-friendly API if you need XPath functionality in your project.
