Gregory Todd Williams

I recently found myself wanting a simple and efficient way to parse RDF files in Swift, and ended up writing a small library that uses David Robillard’s excellent Serd library for RDF syntax. The resulting projects (available on GitHub) are swift-serd, a low-level wrapper around the C API, and SerdParser, a more Swift-y higher-level API that allows parsing of RDF content and handling the resulting triples.

The resulting code benefits from serd’s performance and standards-compliance, and allows very simple parsing of N-Triples and Turtle files:

import SerdParser

// extract all foaf:name triples
let parser = SerdParser()
let count = try parser.parse(file: filename) { (s, p, o) in
    if case .iri("http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name") = p {
        print("\(s) has name \(o) .")
    }
}
print("\(count) triples processed")