Return a string from a web scraping function in swift

Question

Ok so I am scraping some basic data of a web page. I wanted to refactor out my code to another class and return a string from what I retrieved but it is difficult with the async

Answer 1

Essentially, you'll want to provide a completion handler to this function from the main class that can handle just the return of the player name (or not). You'd change the function to not have a return value, but to accept a second parameter that is a completion handler:

func getNameFromProfileUrl(profileUrl: NSURL, completionHandler: (String?) -> Void) {
    let task = NSURLSession.sharedSession().dataTaskWithURL(profileUrl, completionHandler: { (data, response, error) -> Void in
        if error == nil {
            var urlContent = NSString(data: data, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding) as NSString!
            var urlContentArray = urlContent.componentsSeparatedByString("")
            let playerName = statusArray[0] as? String

            completionHandler(playerName)
        } else {
            completionHandler(nil)
        }
    })
    task.resume()
}

From your main class, you'd then call it with something like this:

myWebScraper.getNameFromProfileUrl(profileURL) { playerName in
    // always update UI from the main thread
    NSOperationQueue.mainQueue().addOperationWithBlock {
        if let playerName = playerName {
            playerNameField.text = playerName
        } else {
            playerNameField.text = "Player Not Found"
        }
    }
}