Question

I am an iOS newbie. I want to have a function that loads the content from a local html resource file or a webpage depending on what is specified in a constant. How would I go about doing it? For eg, if I pass a file://… to the function or an http://… , it should render accordingly.

Answer 1

You can easily load webpages like this:

NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:
   [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://stackoverflow.com"]] ;

[webView loadRequest:request] ;

For local files it depends on the location of the file on your device:
For files in your main-bundle (= your project), you can use the same loadRequest function, but build the path differently:

NSString *localFilePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"index" ofType:@"html"] ;
NSURLRequest *localRequest = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:
  [NSURL fileURLWithPath:localFilePath]] ;

[webView loadRequest:localRequest] ;

and if you want to load a html-string in your webView:

NSString *bundlePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath];
NSURL *baseURL = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:bundlePath];

NSString *htmlString = [bundlePath pathForResource:@"index" ofType:@"html"] ;
[webView loadHTMLString:htmlString baseURL:baseURL];

and if your html-file resides in your documents folder of your application (for example a html-file you downloaded):

NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains( NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask ,YES );
NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0];
NSString *path = [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"index.html"];
NSURLRequest *documentsRequest = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:
  [NSURL fileURLWithPath:path]] ;

[webView loadRequest:documentsRequest] ;