UIWebView Example to Load URL in iOS using Swift in Xcode

In this post we will see a simple UIWebView Example. In many cases while building an app we sometimes need to load some other website or URL. In this case UIWebView is very useful. We can use UIWebView class to embed web content in your iOS App. And today in this UIWebView Example we will learn how we can do this.

If you are an absolute beginner then I would recommend you to go through the starting post Getting Started with Xcode and Swift.

Creating a new Xcode Project

• The first thing as always, creating a new Xcode Project.
• Select Single View Application template. I have just created an app named UIWebViewExample.
• Now you will get your Main.storyboard.

Adding UIWebView to Storyboard

• Find WebView and drag it to your Storyboard. (See the image for help).

Connecting WebView to Swift

• We have the WebView in our storyboard and now we need to connect it to ViewController.swift.
• So first we need to open the Assistant Editor, then press control and drag WebView to the code. Same as we done in the Xcode Button Tutorial.

Loading a URL to WebView

• For example lets take URL of Simplified iOS. So we have the URL https://www.simplifiedios.net 
• Now come inside ViewController.swift. Right now the code is as below.

//
//  ViewController.swift
//  UIWebViewExample
//
//  Created by Belal Khan on 15/10/16.
//  Copyright © 2016 Belal Khan. All rights reserved.
//

import UIKit

class ViewController: UIViewController {

    @IBOutlet weak var webView: UIWebView!
    
    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        // Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.
    }

    override func didReceiveMemoryWarning() {
        super.didReceiveMemoryWarning()
        // Dispose of any resources that can be recreated.
    }


}

• We will load the URL inside viewDidLoad() method.

Loading URL

We can easily load any URL inside the WebView. The things needed to do this are:

• NSURL: It will take the URL that we need to load as a String.

        //first we will create a NSURL with the url that we want to load in the webview
        let url = NSURL (string: "https://www.simplifiedios.net");

• NSURLRequest: It will take NSURL object that we created above.

        //now we need an NSURLRequest and it will take the NSURL
        let request = NSURLRequest(URL: url!);

• loadRequest(): We can call this method with the webView object that we already created.  And it will take the NSURLRequest as an argument.

Final Code

• So the final code we have for the ViewController.swift is.

//
//  ViewController.swift
//  UIWebViewExample
//
//  Created by Belal Khan on 15/10/16.
//  Copyright © 2016 Belal Khan. All rights reserved.
//

import UIKit

class ViewController: UIViewController {

    @IBOutlet weak var webView: UIWebView!
    
    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        // Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.
        
        let url = NSURL (string: "https://www.simplifiedios.net");
        let request = NSURLRequest(URL: url!);
        webView.loadRequest(request);
    }

    override func didReceiveMemoryWarning() {
        super.didReceiveMemoryWarning()
        // Dispose of any resources that can be recreated.
    }


}

Running the App

• Now we can test the app, just run it on Simulator.

• So as you can see the URL is loaded in the App.

Loading Local HTML to WebView

• Its not always necessary that you need to load a URL only. Sometimes we need to load local HTML files as well.
• So I have an HTML file named index.html. And we will modify the code of viewDidLoad() as below.

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        // Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.
        
        //getting local file
        let localHtmlFile = NSBundle.mainBundle().URLForResource("index", withExtension: "html");
        
        //creating request
        let request = NSURLRequest(URL: localHtmlFile!);
        
        //loading request
        webView.loadRequest(request);
    }

Loading HTML Directly

• You can hardcode the HTML directly to the WebView as well. For this we have loadHTMLString() method.

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        webView.loadHTMLString("<h1>HTML</h1>", baseURL: nil)
    }

So thats all for this UIWebView Example friends. This was a very basic UIWebView Example. But if you still having some queries or confusion don’t hesitate to leave you comments. And in upcoming post I will share a tutorial with you where you can convert your website to Simple iOS Application using WebView. Thank You 🙂