Question

I am able to pull a webpage into my code as a long string. Now I want to remove everything before a <table> tag, and after the <table> tag – so I only retain the table itself.

I am thinking about either using NSScanner, or regexp. Which do you think is more efficient/easier to code manage? The page may also (in the future) contain two tables, and I would want to extract each one (one after the other) for display in my view.

Any ideas?

And thanks in advance!
Kolya

Answer 1

So – I used NSScanner.

// calling a service to extract the webpage as a string..
NSString *thewebpage = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@", [self getthewebstring]];
NSString *tmpwebpage = @"";

// Assign 'theScanner' to class NSScanner
NSScanner *theScanner = [NSScanner scannerWithString:tmpwebpage];

// find start of TABLE
[theScanner scanUpToString:@"<h2>Table Header</h2>" intoString:nil];
[theScanner scanUpToString:@"</table>" intoString:&tmpwebpage];
NSString *myTableOnlyData = [tmpwebpage stringByAppendingString:@"</table>"];

This worked very well for me.
Kolya