Simple read into string from file Swift OSX?

Question

In the playground (Xcode 7, Swift 2.1) for OSX, this creates nothing but an empty string:

let fileString = "/Users/me/file.txt"
var text = try NSString( contentsOfFile: fileString, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding )

What am I doing wrong?

$ cat /Users/me/file.txt

in the Terminal confirms that the file contains ASCII content.

Thanks in advance!

The code reads a file but you are asking about create a file - which are you after? — mmmmmm, Dec 31 '15 at 14:38
Thanks, Mark! I want to create a string named text from a file named file.txt in directory /Users/me in OSX. Cat /Users/me/file.txt produces content. Sorry about the typo in my first line :) -- fixed that! — Dribbler, Dec 31 '15 at 14:44
Just test your code in a project, playground it is sandboxed. — Leo Dabus, Dec 31 '15 at 15:13
@LeoDabus it's not a duplicate because the question is about accessing a file in a Playground. — vadian, Dec 31 '15 at 15:34
http://stackoverflow.com/a/33404160/2303865 would you like to reopen it and post this one? — Leo Dabus, Dec 31 '15 at 15:35
@LeoDabus I didn't want to be nitpicking but it might be confusing for ingenuous people to be redirected to a slightly different topic ;-) — vadian, Dec 31 '15 at 15:41

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 31 '15 at 15:45

Basically a Playground is sandboxed and has no access to the file system.

To play with files you have to add them to the Resources folder of the Playground and access them with

NSBundle.mainBundle().pathForResource("file", ofType: "txt")

It's always recommended to wrap a try statement in a do - catch block and catch the error.

Update:

For example

let url = NSBundle.mainBundle().URLForResource( "file", withExtension: "txt")!
do { 
  let text = try NSString( contentsOfURL: url, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding) 
} catch let errOpening as NSError { 
  print("Error!", errOpening) 
}

I updated the answer using your sample code. – vadian Dec 31 '15 at 15:39 — vadian, Dec 31 '15 at 15:39

Simple read into string from file Swift OSX?

1 Answers1