Getting source HTML from a WebView in Cocoa

Question

I'm working on a OS X program where the user does some light WYSIWYG HTML editing in a WebView. Being new to programming with Cocoa and WebKit, I have absolutely no idea how to get selected text from a WebView - the intention being to take what the user selected, add HTML code (like div's or span's) around the text, and replace the selected text with the modified code. How can this be accomplished?

I'm currently programming this project with MacRuby, but I'd appreciate help from Objective-C programmers as well. Thank you!

Answer 1

You can ask for the WebView's -selectedDOMRange and you'll get a DOMRange object back. You can use this object to find out what is selected. DOMRange, like all WebKit DOM objects, is an Objective-C representation of a standard W3C DOMRange object, see DOMRange.h for what methods/properties it supports.

You can then replace the current selection using the -replaceSelectionWithMarkupString:, -replaceSelectionWithText: or -replaceSelectionWithNode: methods of WebView.

Answer 2

Apple recommends using this snippet here to retrieve the HTML content of a WebKit WebView:

[(DOMHTMLElement *)[[[webView mainFrame] DOMDocument] documentElement] outerHTML];

If you want the HTML interpreted as plain text, you can use:

[(DOMHTMLElement *)[[[webView mainFrame] DOMDocument] documentElement] outerText];

Answer 3

UIWebView lets you run arbitrary JavaScript:

[webview stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML"]