Swift 2: How can I assign a dynamic number of strings to an array of Strings?

Question

Context:

I'm attempting to create an app that populates a UICollectionView (tvOS) based on the contents of a folder in a local server I'm running. The way I'm trying to do this (and it may be completely wrong way) is to 'scrape' the html of my server pages.

I have the following property defined:

let moviesArray: [String] = ["<li>Example 1</li>", "<li>Example 2</li>"]

My UICollectionView will return the number of UICollectionViewCell's equal to moviesArray.count so I need this number (along with additional data that I won't speak to in this question).

Problem:

The number of files/folders I add to my server is dynamic and will increase / decrease depending on what movies I add to it or delete from it. This will obviously change the html which is returned.

I have the following piece of code that returns the html of my local server's URL and converts it to a string. I then create a substring of that based on a range, and then split out each individual <li> element from the html. Here's the code:

     do {

        let url:NSURL? = NSURL(string: "http://localhost:8888/Files/movies/")

        // 'contentsOfURL' returns the html code of the page
        let html:String? = try NSString(contentsOfURL: url!, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding) as String
        print(html)

        // creates a substring of 'html' based on a range defined below
        let ulString = html![(html?.startIndex.advancedBy(164))!...(html?.endIndex.advancedBy(-22))!]
        print("<ul> substring is: \(ulString)")

        // Splits each <li> into a separate string
        let liSplit = ulString.characters.split{$0 == "\n"}.map(String.init)
        print("li 1 is: \(liSplit[0])")
        print("li 2 is: \(liSplit[1])")
        print("li 3 is: \(liSplit[2])")

    } catch {
        print("the error is: \(error)")
    }

My Question:

How can I add or remove String objects to self.moviesArray based on the number of <li> elements that are in the html string which is returned? How will I assign each member of liSplit to self.moviesArray if it is a dynamic number?

Answer 1

You need to declare you moviesArray as variable, not as constant and initialize it:

var moviesArray = [String]()

Then you can go ahead and simply add all the retrieved element to it:

moviesArray += liSplit