Web scraping in apple swift 3 - swift3

Question

I'm a Swift beginner and I'm trying to figure out how to retrieve text from a web article, create a new text file and save the text data into it (Using Swift Playgrounds). Is this possible?
The only thing I could find online regarding the subject was this, and I don't think it is even written for Swift 3:
P.S. If my question needs more details, please let me know instead of putting it on hold. Thanks!
import Cocoa
var url = NSURL(string: "http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tv-news-ces-2017-120931816.html")
if url != nil {
let task = NSURLSession.sharedSession().dataTaskWithURL(url!, completionHandler: { (data, response, error) -> Void in
print(data)
if error == nil {
var urlContent = NSString(data: data, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding) as NSString!
print(urlContent)

Answer 1

That's Swift 2.3. In Swift 3 use URL instead of NSURL and use URLSession rather than NSURLSession, etc. You'd also use String rather than NSString. E.g.
let url = URL(string: "http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tv-news-ces-2017-120931816.html")!
let task = URLSession.shared.dataTask(with: url) { data, response, error in
guard let data = data, error == nil else {
print("\(error)")
return
}
let string = String(data: data, encoding: .utf8)
print("\(string)")
}
task.resume()
If you're going to do this in a playground, remember that this runs asynchronously, so you'll need to set needsIndefiniteExecution.
import PlaygroundSupport
PlaygroundPage.current.needsIndefiniteExecution = true
To actually parse the HTML, you should consider using a HTML parser like TFHpple (written in Objective-C, but still works great from Swift) or NDHpple (a Swift version, in which I don't have as much confidence as TFHpple, but probably would work fine).
You might want to see How to Parse HTML on iOS. It's dated, but walks you through the concepts (making sure you're not violating ToS of the web site, how to use the parsers, etc.).
If you want to save this to a file, you can do something like:
let fileURL = try! FileManager.default.url(for: .documentDirectory, in: .userDomainMask, appropriateFor: nil, create: false)
.appendingPathComponent("test.dat")
try! data.write(to: fileURL)
You can use whatever file extension you want.