Web search in an iPhone app

Question

I've got experience in C/C++ and am trying to now learn Objective-C for iPhone development. I have very little web design experience.

I'm trying to create an app for a friend's site that accesses a search feature from a website and then display the results in a UITableView. For example, (this isn't the site I'll be using, but...) using the stackoverflow search function and then being able to format the results (http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=iphone+web+search) in cells. I'd like to leave out the rest of the content on the page.

I've only been able to find info about reading xml or rss search results. Otherwise, I could use UIWebView, but that displays the entire site. Are there other classes that I should look into for doing this? Any help would be very, very much appreciated!

Answer 1

The iPhone SDK doesn't include Cocoa libraries for parsing HTML. Just NSXMLParser, which isn't a good tool for what you want to do. (It will choke on valid HTML that isn't valid XML.)

This page is probably a good first place to look. The author says, "For scraping/reading a webpage, XPath is the best choice. It is faster and less memory intensive then NSXMLParser, and very concise. My experience with it has been positive."