Extract text from Swift string

Question

I have an array of strings and I want to extract only what's inside <>.

<div class=\"name\" title=\"&quot;User&quot; <John Appleseed>\">
<div class=\"name\" title=\"&quot;User&quot; <Bill Gates>\">

So the result I expect is ["John Appleseed", "Bill Gates"]

"Is there any way to do this?" – just ask yourself: do you see any logical pattern which you as a human would use to distinguish <John Appleseed> from <div> if you didn't know HTML? — LinusG.
– LinusG., Commented Sep 23, 2019 at 10:35
From the top of my head, there are three ways here: 1) <John Appleseed> is inside quotes. Will that always be the case? If so, you could make use of that. 2) You could make a list of known html tags to distinguish between actual and seeming html tags 3) parse the HTML and then find strings inside tags (which then aren't real html tags). — LinusG.
– LinusG., Commented Sep 23, 2019 at 10:38
@LinusGeffarth - I was able to collect all div classes. No I have an array of '<div class=\"name\" title=\""User" <John Appleseed>\">', how do I extract only what's inside "<>" in this case is John Appleseed — Kayla tucker
– Kayla tucker, Commented Sep 23, 2019 at 11:01
Try <[\w\s]+> as starting point using regexpal.com (or similar). Depending on how similar the elements in the array are, that may be it already. — LinusG.
– LinusG., Commented Sep 23, 2019 at 11:04
@LinusGeffarth the pattern you provided is not valid in Swift — Kayla tucker
– Kayla tucker, Commented Sep 23, 2019 at 11:26

Joakim Danielson · Accepted Answer · 2019-09-23 12:00:36Z

1

If you have filtered out the correct rows and the structure of the string is the same you can use lastIndex(of:) and firstIndex(of:) functions to find the inner <> pair and then extract a substring from that

if let first = str.lastIndex(of:"<"), let last = str.firstIndex(of:">") {
    let name = String(str[str.index(after: first)..<last])
}

Example

let strings = ["<div class=\"name\" title=\"&quot;User&quot; <John Appleseed>\">", "<div class=\"name\" title=\"&quot;User&quot; <Bill Gates>\">"]

for str in strings {
  if let first = str.lastIndex(of:"<"), let last = str.firstIndex(of:">") {
    let name = String(str[str.index(after: first)..<last])
    print(name)
  }
}

produces

John Appleseed
Bill Gates

edited Sep 23, 2019 at 12:00

answered Sep 23, 2019 at 11:47

Joakim Danielson

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