bbc-news-swift

A Swift client and unofficial documentation for the BBC News API.

This project is for educational and research purposes only.

Installation

bbc-news-swift can be installed using Swift Package Manager by adding the following to your Package.swift file:

.package(url: "https://github.com/bilaalrashid/bbc-news-swift.git", .upToNextMajor(from: "1.1.2"))

Usage

Full documentation is available on Swift Package Index.

Fetching data

import BbcNews

let bbcNews = BbcNews(modelIdentifier: "iPhone15,2", systemName: "iOS", systemVersion: "17.0")

// Get results from the home page
let results = await bbcNews.fetchIndexDiscoveryPage(postcode: "W1A")

// Get results from a topic page
let results = await bbcNews.fetchTopicDiscoveryPage(for: "c50znx8v8y4t")

// Check if the network call was a success or not
switch result {
case .success(let result):
    // Parse story promo from a set of discovery results and fetch the full contents of that story
    for item in result.data.items {
        if case .storyPromo(let storyPromo) = item {
            let url = storyPromo.link.destinations[0].url 

            // Get the full contents of the story
            let story = await bbcNews.fetch(url: url)
        }
    }

case .failure(let error):
    print(error)
}

Result type

All methods have equivalents to support both the Result type and traditional try. You can use the try equivalents by appending Throwing to the end of a method name.

Result:

let result = await bbcNews.fetchIndexDiscoveryPage(postcode: "W1A")
switch result {
case .success(let results):
    print(results) // [...]

case .failure(let error):
    print(error)
}

try:

let results = try await bbcNews.fetchIndexDiscoveryPageThrowing(postcode: "W1A")
print(results) // [...]

Utilities

import BbcNews

// Check if a URL is part of the BBC News API
BbcNews.isApiUrl(url: URL(string: "https://bbc.co.uk")!) // false

// Convert a webpage URL to a URL for the API
BbcNews.convertWebUrlToApi(url: URL(string: "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c289n8m4j19o")!) // https://news-app.api.bbc.co.uk/fd/app-article-api?clientName=Chrysalis&clientVersion=pre-7&page=https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c289n8m4j19o

Development

This project uses SwiftLint to enforce coding style. You can check for any style violations and attempt to fix them using:

swiftlint --config .swiftlint.yml --strict [--fix]

The test suite uses local files in the tests resources bundle. This causes tests to fail in Xcode, so tests must be run from the command line.

swift test

Full contributing guidelines can be found in CONTRIBUTING.md.

OpenAPI

Documentation of the API is defined using OpenAPI and automatically built using the CI (accessible at https://bilaalrashid.github.io/bbc-news-swift).

These schema files can be linted using Redocly:

redocly lint openapi/*/openapi.yaml

Changes to these files can be visualised by generating a pageset:

redocly build-docs openapi/<version>/openapi.yaml

Release

On the main branch:

1. Bump the tag and update the README

make release # Defaults to patch
make release-<major|minor|patch>
make release-version VERSION=<version>

2. Push to the remote

git push --follow-tags

3. Create a corresponding release on GitHub