iOS Using HTML links to fetch data

[pietrozuco]

I'm creating an interactive book for learning languages. It has reading, quiz and some simple game. The content of each chapter is an HTML file. The book allows the user to learn about 300 words that exist in the text. Earch word was enclosed in a link like this: < a href="word">word< /a> when the user touch the link, a modal view appears with the translation and information about that word.

This is the code I'm using to get the link:

- (BOOL)webView:(UIWebView *)webView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType
{   
    // currentWord is the word in the link
    self.currentWord = [[request URL] lastPathComponent];

    // okToCatchLinks is a BOOL that I use to avoid showing the modalview when the page
    // is loaded for the first time.
    if (okToCatchLinks){
        NSLog(@"Ok to catch links!");
        WordViewController *viewController = [[WordViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"WordViewController" bundle:nil]

        // I did my homework creating the delegate protocol to dismiss the modal view.    
        viewController.delegate = self;

        // This is a label in the modalview showing the word in the HTML link.
        viewController.labelTitle = self.currentWord;

        // Create a Navigation controller to add the "DONE" dismiss button
        UINavigationController *navController = [[UINavigationController alloc]
                                             initWithRootViewController:viewController];
        navController.modalPresentationStyle = UIModalPresentationFormSheet;
        navController.modalTransitionStyle = UIModalTransitionStyleFlipHorizontal;

        // show the navigation controller modally
        [self presentModalViewController:navController animated:YES];

        // Clean up resources
        [navController release];
        [viewController release];
    }
    okToCatchLinks = YES;
    return YES;
}

With this code I will get the selected word in a string variable. Then I search that word in the DB using CoreData. The HTML is UTF-8 encoded. I have to be able to search for that word in different languages. So if the user click on the word (日本語) or (résumé) I have to be able to find it in the DB. For the data store I converted an CSV file to a .sqlite file.

I wonder if there is a better way to do this. Personally I don't like to use < a href=""> to get the link, but I couldn't find any other way to get the current word in a link. Also performing the search of that word in the DB is not clean, because I'm not using any UID for each row. I just compare the string holding the word with the words in the corresponding column of the DB.

Is there a more efficient way to do this?

To resume: Having a list of words, mark those words in the HTML so the user can touch and retrieve information about that word from a DB.

Thank you in advance.

Pietro