Read in text file using swift

Question

Brand new to Swift, but done a fair amount of coding in other languages (Java, C, Python...) and I'm frustrated at how seemingly difficult it is to simply read in a file.

I've read a number of posts, like this one, but can't get their suggestions to work. Also read this post and this one but the solutions seemed long for such a simple task and also didn't work for me.

Here's a simple version:

    import Foundation
    let path = "./data.txt"        
    let fileContents = String(contentsOfFile: path, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding)        
    print(fileContents) // prints out: ("./data.txt", 4)
    let lines : [String] = fileContents.componentsSeparatedByString("\n") // error: value of type 'String' has no member 'componentsSeparatedByString'       

Now, based on the first post I linked above, I expected this to read the specified file into a single string, then split the string on newlines and give me an array with each line as an element. Instead, when I print fileContents, I get some type of tuple rather than the string I expected. And when I try to split the string, apparently that function doesn't exist.

Can someone explain what I'm missing and show me a short, simple way to read the lines from a file into a string array? I'm reading the documentation but can't even find an explanation of the String() call in line 3 or reference to the componentsSeparatedByString() in line 5 so I'm going totally off the suggestions in that first post; any pointers are much appreciated.

Answer 1

For me I believe the problems with other solutions stemmed from me developing on a Linux platform, which at the time didn't seem to work as on a mac. This is basically what ended up with that works for me:

    import Foundation

    func readFile(path: String) -> Array<String> {

        do { 
            let contents:NSString = try NSString(contentsOfFile: path, encoding: NSASCIIStringEncoding)
            let trimmed:String = contents.stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet(NSCharacterSet.whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet())
            let lines:Array<String> =  NSString(string: trimmed).componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet(.newlineCharacterSet())
            return lines
        } catch {
            print("Unable to read file: \(path)");
            return [String]()    
        }    
    }

    let lines = readFile("./somefile.txt")
    print("Read \(lines.count) lines from file: \(lines)")