parsing HTML in swift

Question

Can anyone help me out with this one:

I have a HTTP page formatted this way:

<ul class="ms-spbTree" id="_ul"> <li id="XXX\$username">Person0 <ul id="XXX\$username_ul"> <li id="XXX\$username">Person1 <ul id="XXX\$username_ul"></ul> </li> <li id="XXX\$username">Person2 <ul id="XXX\$username_ul"></ul> </li> <li id="XXX\$username">Person3 <ul id="XXX\$username_ul"></ul> </li> <li id="XXX\$username">Person4 <ul id="XXX\$username_ul"> <li id="XXX\$username">Person5 <ul id="XXX\$username_ul"></ul> </li> <li id="XXX\$username">Person6 <ul id="XXX\$username_ul"></ul> </li> <li id="XXX\$username">Person7 <ul id="XXX\$username_ul"></ul> </li> </ul> </li> <li id="XXX\$username">Person8 <ul id="XXX\$username_ul"></ul> </li> </ul> </li> </ul>

My function is:

func loadTutorial(webString: NSString) { var data : NSData = webString.dataUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding)! var tutorialsParser = TFHpple(HTMLData: data) var tutorialsXPathString = "//ul/li" var tutorialNodes = tutorialsParser.searchWithXPathQuery(tutorialsXPathString) as NSArray if(tutorialNodes.count == 0) { println("empty here") } else { for element in tutorialNodes { var elementTwo: TFHppleElement = element as TFHppleElement // var tutorial = Tutorial() println("\(elementTwo.firstChild.content)") // println(elementTwo.raw) let userscanner = NSScanner(string:elementTwo.raw) var userscanned: NSString? if userscanner.scanUpToString("li id=\"", intoString:nil){ userscanner.scanString("li id=\"", intoString:nil) if userscanner.scanUpToString("\">", intoString:&userscanned) { let newResult: String = userscanned as String println("NewResultValue: \(newResult)") } } } } }

But what i get is the following list:

Person0 Person1 Person2 Person3 Person4 Person5 Person6 Person7 Person8

I only want to retrieve

Person0 Person1 Person2 Person3 Person4 Person8

Or i list so i know that Person5,6 and 7 are having Person4 as manager.

I tried with

var tutorialsXPathString = "//ul[not(contains(@style, 'style=\"display: none;\"'))/li"

Because all sub persons (5,6,7) have this in ther tag, but it did not work :(

Any help would be appreciated.

Rob · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-14 21:18:20Z

A couple of thoughts:

The use of // says "find this anywhere in the HTML". If you want to control what level you want to consider, just use / and follow this from the root of the document. For example, to get the second level, but not the first or third levels, you'd do something like:

let tutorialsParser = TFHpple(HTMLData: data) let tutorialsXPathString = "/html/body/ul/li/ul/li" if let tutorialNodes = tutorialsParser.searchWithXPathQuery(tutorialsXPathString) as? [TFHppleElement] { for element in tutorialNodes { let content = element.firstChild.content.stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet(NSCharacterSet.whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet()) let identifier = element.attributes["id"] as String println("id = \(identifier); content = \(content)") } }

Note, I'm not sure why you were using the scanner, but if you want the attributes of an element, you can use the attributes method.
I also defined the tutorialNodes to be an array of TFHppleElement objects, which simplifies the for loop a bit.

If you wanted the top level /ul/li followed by the second level, but not the third level, you could do something like:

let tutorialsParser = TFHpple(HTMLData: data) let tutorialsXPathString = "/html/body/ul/li" if let tutorialNodes = tutorialsParser.searchWithXPathQuery(tutorialsXPathString) as? [TFHppleElement] { for element in tutorialNodes { let content = element.firstChild.content.stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet(NSCharacterSet.whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet()) let identifier = element.attributes["id"] as String println("id = \(identifier); content = \(content)") if let ul = element.childrenWithTagName("ul") as? [TFHppleElement] { if let li = ul.first?.childrenWithTagName("li") as? [TFHppleElement] { for element in li { let content = element.firstChild.content.stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet(NSCharacterSet.whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet()) let identifier = element.attributes["id"] as String println(" child id = \(identifier); content = \(content)") } } } } }

Or you could do something like:

let tutorialsParser = TFHpple(HTMLData: data) let tutorialsXPathString = "/html/body/ul/li" if let tutorialNodes = tutorialsParser.searchWithXPathQuery(tutorialsXPathString) as? [TFHppleElement] { for element in tutorialNodes { let content = element.firstChild.content.stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet(NSCharacterSet.whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet()) let identifier = element.attributes["id"] as String println("id = \(identifier); content = \(content)") if let children = element.searchWithXPathQuery("/html/body/li/ul/li") as? [TFHppleElement] { for element in children { let content = element.firstChild.content.stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet(NSCharacterSet.whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet()) let identifier = element.attributes["id"] as String println(" child id = \(identifier); content = \(content)") } } } }

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