Extract Value from html website using XPATH, Swift

Question

I want to extract: 51.39%, from this website www.bayyinah.org

You can see the text just over the donate button 51.39% of $6 Million

This is the code that i am using to TRY get that value.

let task = NSURLSession.sharedSession().dataTaskWithURL(url!, completionHandler: { (data, response, error) -> Void in

    if error == nil {

        let urlContent = NSString(data: data!, encoding: NSASCIIStringEncoding) as NSString!

        do {
            // if encoding is omitted, it defaults to NSUTF8StringEncoding
            let doc = try HTMLDocument(string: urlContent as String, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding)

            // XPath queries
            for element in doc.xpath("//*[@id='so_far']/text()") {
                print(element)
            }

        } catch let error {
            print(error)
        }
    }
})
task.resume()

}

The result that i am getting is:

0%

Thank you!

adamretter · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-20 17:40:04Z

1

You can't do what you are trying to achieve with XPath alone, the HTML itself contains the code:

<div class="row">
    <div class="mil"><strong id="so_far">0%</strong> <span class="light">of $6 Million</span></div>
</div>

You can see that if you run curl https://www.bayyinah.org/

It seems that the web-browser, after retrieving the HTML, subsequently executes some JavaScript which inserts the value.

However if you examine how they do this, you will see that they call this service https://www.bayyinah.org/api.php?action=get_so_far&clinet_tz=Europe%2FLondon which returns the following JSON with your answer:

{"total_so_far":51.498683333333}

So maybe just use their API?

answered Jun 20, 2016 at 17:40

adamretter

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3 Comments

AppCodah Over a year ago

Perfect love you man. Just a question. Where did you see that service they are using. when i press inspect i cant seem to find what you find

adamretter Over a year ago

I used Chrome Developer tools to monitor the network requests they were making.

Mirko Over a year ago

6sajwt6d6i.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/default/…

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