Reading a RTF file and parse plaintext

Question

I am doing this to get the content of a file using NSOpenPanel, but I am getting a lot of weird stuff returned from the .rtf file I select.

My panel code:

var panel: NSOpenPanel = NSOpenPanel()

var fileTypesArray: NSArray = ["txt", "rtf", "nil"]

panel.canChooseFiles = true
panel.allowedFileTypes = fileTypesArray as [AnyObject]
panel.allowsMultipleSelection = false

if panel.runModal() == NSModalResponseOK {
    var url = panel.URL!.path
    println(url)

    let path = url
    let expandedPath = path!.stringByExpandingTildeInPath
    let data: NSData? = NSData(contentsOfFile: expandedPath)

    if let fileData = data {
        let content = NSString(data: fileData, encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding) as! String
        println(content)
    }
}

The contents of my .rtf document is "Testing 123"

This is what is being printed to the console:

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1347\cocoasubrtf570
{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Helvetica;}
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
\paperw11900\paperh16840\margl1440\margr1440\vieww10800\viewh8400\viewkind0
\pard\tx566\tx1133\tx1700\tx2267\tx2834\tx3401\tx3968\tx4535\tx5102\tx5669\tx6236\tx6803\pardirnatural

\f0\fs24 \cf0 Testing 123\
}

Is there any way I can get just the text from the file, and what is all the other stuff that is being printed?

Answer 1

That "other stuff" is the actual RTF data.

I would recommend using the NSAttributedString initializer NSAttributedString(path:documentAttributes:), which will read in and process the RTF data. Then you can access the plain text by using attributedString.string.

In your case, it would be

if let content = NSAttributedString(path: expandedPath, documentAttributes: nil) {
    // do something with content or content.string
}