How Could I Request Text from a Website in Swift

How to get text from Web page in macOS via Swift?

for iOS, in the webview's delegate method

func webViewDidFinishLoad(_ webView: UIWebView) {  
    var string = webView.stringByEvaluatingJavaScript(from: "document.body.textContent")
    print(string)
}

for macOS, in the webview's navigation delegate:

override func viewDidLoad() {
    webview.nagivationDelegate = self
    ...
}

func webView(_ webView: WKWebView, didFinish navigation: WKNavigation!) {
    webView.evaluateJavaScript("document.body.textContent") { (string, error) in
            print(string)
    }
}

How to read text on a web page in swift for ios

You can use URLSession dataTask(with url:) to download your string data asynchronously:

import UIKit
import PlaygroundSupport
PlaygroundPage.current.needsIndefiniteExecution = true

let scheme = "http"
let host = "services.runescape.com"
let path = "/m=hiscore_oldschool/index_lite.ws"
let player = "bob"
let queryItem = URLQueryItem(name: "player", value: player)

var urlComponents = URLComponents()
urlComponents.scheme = scheme
urlComponents.host = host
urlComponents.path = path
urlComponents.queryItems = [queryItem]
if let url = urlComponents.url {
    print(url) // "http://services.runescape.com/m=hiscore_oldschool/index_lite.ws?player=bob\n"

    URLSession.shared.dataTask(with: url) { data, response, error in
        guard let data = data, error ==  nil, let string = String(data:data, encoding: .utf8) else { return }
        print(string)  // 58009,1806,205602075\n348,99,59484076\n14451,99,16670682\n22760,99,16641294\n4372,99,35456433\n64147,99,13034611\n14021,99,13034458\n269415,79,1897071\n57799,99,13034505\n42650,87,4136181\n262455,70,742935\n12795,99,13034536\n254495,60,275820\n89361,75,1213576\n190818,62,341931\n272854,60,284103\n111969,66,507089\n66399,74,1177748\n64643,72,915704\n10231,99,13059448\n187538,52,132708\n162920,50,106555\n175923,62,351621\n295606,46,68990\n327642,1\n179487,5\n72965,106\n-1,-1\n-1,-1\n48877,85\n-1,-1\n24712,15\n-1,-1\n\n"
    }.resume()
}

How to make HTTP request in Swift?

You can use URL, URLRequest and URLSession or NSURLConnection as you'd normally do in Objective-C. Note that for iOS 7.0 and later, URLSession is preferred.

Using URLSession

Initialize a URL object and a URLSessionDataTask from URLSession. Then run the task with resume().

let url = URL(string: "http://www.stackoverflow.com")!

let task = URLSession.shared.dataTask(with: url) {(data, response, error) in
    guard let data = data else { return }
    print(String(data: data, encoding: .utf8)!)
}

task.resume()

Using NSURLConnection

First, initialize a URL and a URLRequest:

let url = URL(string: "http://www.stackoverflow.com")!
var request = URLRequest(url: url)
request.httpMethod = "POST" 

Then, you can load the request asynchronously with:

NSURLConnection.sendAsynchronousRequest(request, queue: OperationQueue.main) {(response, data, error) in
    guard let data = data else { return }
    print(String(data: data, encoding: .utf8)!)
}

Or you can initialize an NSURLConnection:

let connection = NSURLConnection(request: request, delegate:nil, startImmediately: true)

Just make sure to set your delegate to something other than nil and use the delegate methods to work with the response and data received.

For more detail, check the documentation for the NSURLConnectionDataDelegate protocol

Testing on an Xcode playground

If you want to try this code on a Xcode playground, add import PlaygroundSupport to your playground, as well as the following call:

PlaygroundPage.current.needsIndefiniteExecution = true

This will allow you to use asynchronous code in playgrounds.

How do I retrieve text and images from websites (in HTML or JSON) on iOS Swift?

Question 1: Not all websites expose their content formatted as JSON.

Question 2: I think you should look at a couple of resources. First Ray Wenderlich has a tutorial on how to parse HTML. Although it is using Objective-C you should be able to learn quite a lot there.

When you have read that tutorial I would recommend you look at the Swift library Alamofire. There is another tutorial on the Wenderlich site covering this library.

Happy coding!

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