UIWebView - How to get the content that is shown

[Marco]

Is there a way to get the content (the text inside the UIWebView) of the UIWebView?

I tried [[webView request] HTTPBodyStream]; but I was getting a crash.

[Marco]

I found the solutions and I will post it just in case it might help someone else.

NSString *myText = [webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"document.documentElement.textContent"];

[aryaxt]

that doesn't seem to return the html code
it only return the text inside the uiwebView
is there any way to get the full html?
for example i add
<font color="red">qasdasd</font>
when i try to read the content i get "qasdasd"

[DC Studios]

Originally Posted by aryaxt

that doesn't seem to return the html code
it only return the text inside the uiwebView
is there any way to get the full html?
for example i add
<font color="red">qasdasd</font>
when i try to read the content i get "qasdasd"

That's because in the example he grabs everything the textContent property contains. You can use the body's inner HTML to get the tags. Just change the JavaScript to

document.body.innerHTML

[aryaxt]

thanks
I used "document.documentElement.outerHTML"
that worked for me 2

[Bertrand21]

do you know how to use this to get the title of the page presented? i tried
@"document.title.textContent" but did not bring back anything

****SOLVED 2 minutes later**** with
"document.title"

[DGYWFT]

I did not know you could pull data from the UIWebView like this, this is great! So if I wanted to send some text to the application, I could put the text in a div with an id/name, hide the div so its not shown, then extract it like above to be used somewhere in my apps view?

[farhadf]

The API seems really weak here. Is it just me or does this seem like a really roundabout way of getting at the content? A "content" or "text" property would seem more appropriate.

[funkytaco]

farhadf,
DOM is a well-known model; look it up on Wikipedia.

Anyhow, anyone know why I'm getting crashes unless I do this? Maybe it's because I'm in the Simulator?

NSString *title = appDelegate.stringTitle;

NSMutableString *theTitle = [webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"document. title"];
if (theTitle) {
txtTitle.text = theTitle;

} else {
txtTitle.text = title;

}

[macayer]

What about if we want to get the data of a pdf from a uiwebview?

[listingboat]

Originally Posted by macayer

What about if we want to get the data of a pdf from a uiwebview?

Can't be done. You need to use Quartz for this. Search for CGPDFDocumentCreateWithURL and CGPDFScannerRef. You'll find examples of parsing PDF files to get the text.

BUT, be warned, parsing PDFs for text is painful. There are strings and string arrays in PDFs, but that doesn't guarantee you can parse a PDF. Some PDFs don't have text at all but use custom "glyphs" to represent characters.

Additionally, you have to handle figuring out if there is a space or not in a string array. You may end up parsing through the array and not finding any spaces. Then you have to look at the distance between characters to figure out where the spaces are.