i have a UIWebView loaded with a simple rtf file. (containing one line "THIS IS A TEST")

UIWebView* webview = [[UIWebView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(5, 50, 310, 400)];
[[self view] addSubview:webview];
[webview loadRequest:[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"test" ofType:@"rtf"]isDirectory:NO]]];
NSString *html = [webview stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString: @"all"];
NSLog (@"html:%@", html.debugDescription);

The "THIS IS A TEXT" line appears inside the UIWebView correctly. Does anyone know if it's somehow possible to extract that line of text (or more) to an NSString or some other accessible container ?

I know there is:

NSString *html = [webview stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString: @"document.documentElement.outerHTML"];

but that (obviously) doesn't work here. any ideas ? I'm basically trying to (fake) convert a rtf file to an NSString on iOS. Thank you!

i have a UIWebView loaded with a simple rtf file. (containing one line "THIS IS A TEST")

UIWebView* webview = [[UIWebView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(5, 50, 310, 400)];
[[self view] addSubview:webview];
[webview loadRequest:[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"test" ofType:@"rtf"]isDirectory:NO]]];
NSString *html = [webview stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString: @"all"];
NSLog (@"html:%@", html.debugDescription);

The "THIS IS A TEXT" line appears inside the UIWebView correctly. Does anyone know if it's somehow possible to extract that line of text (or more) to an NSString or some other accessible container ?

I know there is:

NSString *html = [webview stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString: @"document.documentElement.outerHTML"];

but that (obviously) doesn't work here. any ideas ? I'm basically trying to (fake) convert a rtf file to an NSString on iOS. Thank you!

• javascript
• objective-c
• ios
• uiwebview

• have you tried document.body.innerHTML? – J Max Commented Jun 7, 2012 at 1:06
• yes. and document.body.innerText . both e back blank. – EarlGrey Commented Jun 7, 2012 at 1:20
• Are you waiting till the page has loaded before calling stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:? – Piepants Commented Jun 7, 2012 at 2:12
• actually, you were right. I had to implement webViewDidFinishLoad delegate method and then I started to get some html results inside of it. sleep(int) was not the way to go. you should change this to an aswer. – EarlGrey Commented Jun 7, 2012 at 4:27

3 Answers 3

It turns out document.documentElement.innerText is the way to go. Gets me the plain text right away.

Instead of fetching html from UIWebView, and again apply extra efforts to convert html into plain text we can directly use below code to fetch text content from UIWebView:

NSString *plainText = [webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"document.body.textContent"];

It saves your extra efforts for converting html into plain text.

I've actually had to do something similar in the past. Maybe not the most elegant, but here is what worked for me:

I would load the text from the file in to an HTML page (you can do this with javascript from inside the UIWebView, or you can do it from Objective-C creating a javascript method to call using stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString). Then you can run the method call you outlined above, which should work fine, or you can create a custom method in Javascript that would capture and return the text to the Objective-C code. Here, it is stored as a string and is ready to go.