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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-02T09:43:05+00:00

I’m developing a mobile app (iOS 5.0 and above compatible) for a website where

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I’m developing a mobile app (iOS 5.0 and above compatible) for a website where users can view certain data directly from their landing page. The user can refine the results by selecting specific options (i.e. location and/or date). They don’t offer any web service calls, and won’t allow us to access their database. So my only resort of collecting the data is from ‘scraping’ the site directly.

My issue is that I don’t know how make the changes that the users can make on the site from a http request from the phone. For example the site below:

enter image description here

can be pulled from the site and saved as a string with the following command

NSString *html = [NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:urlrequest encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:&err];

I’m able to separate the relevant data:

// I decided to add the script function name in case anyone wanted to look for themselves
<script type="text/javascript" language="Javascript">
//<![CDATA[
function loadData(){

var winMsgTitle = "Date: 04/11/2012";

// this is the actual data I'm concerned with:
gLatLong = new GLatLng(31.59019444444444, -110.50655555555555);
tmpMapIcon = new MapIcon("0_0", 21, 15);
marker = createMarker(gLatLong, 0.0, createInfoWinMsg(winMsgTitle, ".00", ".84", "5711", "2012", "", "07:00"), tmpMapIcon);
map.addOverlay(marker);
point = null;marker = null;
gLatLong = new GLatLng(32.2938260182, -110.7896411419);
tmpMapIcon = new MapIcon("0_0", 21, 15);
marker = createMarker(gLatLong, 0.0, createInfoWinMsg(winMsgTitle, ".00", "1.00", "1254", "2012", "", "07:00"), tmpMapIcon);
map.addOverlay(marker);
point = null;marker = null;
gLatLong = new GLatLng(33.5966853633, -112.1744066477);
tmpMapIcon = new MapIcon("0_0", 21, 15);
marker = createMarker(gLatLong, 0.0, createInfoWinMsg(winMsgTitle, ".00", ".70", "256", "2012", "", "07:00"), tmpMapIcon);
map.addOverlay(marker);
point = null;marker = null;

Note: There are obviously more points, this is just snip it

In order to get another location, or date, I have to manually select via the site and select the options on the right hand pane. My question is, how do I make those changes programmatically via objective-c?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I suppose you use UIWebView to load that page.

    One possible solution is to write JavaScript functions to simulate normal user operations on the right hand pane (for example, use jQuery’s trigger function to select the drop down list, select ‘Date Range’, etc.).

    These javascript functions could be coded as strings in your app code.

    Then, call stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString: on the webview to run these javascript functions:

    [webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:javascript]

    Here the javascript parameter is a string you construct that calls your javascript functions. For example:

    NSString *javascript = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"selectRegion(%@)", targetRegion];

    When doing this, I’d suggest you write these javascripts and test them using a browser’s debug tool(Safari’s Web Inspector, Firefox’s FireBug plugin…) to make sure they work as expect first.

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