FavIcon is a tiny Swift library for downloading the favicon representing a website.

Wait, why is a library needed to do this? Surely it's just a simple HTTP GET of /favicon.ico, right? Right? Well. Go have a read of this StackOverflow post, and see how you feel afterwards.

Note: CocoaPods (1.4.0 or later) is required.

Add it to your Podfile:

use_frameworks!
pod 'FavIcon', '~> 3.0.0'

Add it to your Cartfile:

github "leonbreedt/FavIcon" ~> 3.0.0

• Detection of /favicon.ico if it exists
• Parsing of the HTML at a URL, and scanning for appropriate <link> or <meta> tags that refer to icons using Apple, Google or Microsoft conventions.
• Discovery of and parsing of Web Application manifest JSON files to obtain lists of icons.
• Discovery of and parsing of Microsoft browser configuration XML files for obtaining lists of icons.

Yup. These are all potential ways of indicating that your website has an icon that can be used in user interfaces. Good work, fellow programmers. 👍

Perhaps you have a location in your user interface where you want to put the icon of a website the user is currently visiting?

try FavIcon.downloadPreferred("https://apple.com") { result in
    if case let .success(image) = result {
      // On iOS, this is a UIImage, do something with it here.
      // This closure will be executed on the main queue, so it's safe to touch
      // the UI here.
    }
}

This will detect all of the available icons at the URL, and if it is able to determine their sizes, it will try to find the icon closest in size to your desired size, otherwise, it will prefer the largest icon. If it has no idea of the size of any of the icons, it will prefer the first one it found.

Of course, if this approach is too opaque for you, you can download them all using downloadAll(url:completion:).

Or perhaps you’d like to take a stab at downloading them yourself at a later time, choosing which icon you prefer based on your own criteria, in which case scan(url:completion:) will give you information about the detected icons, which you can feed to download(url:completion:) for downloading at your convenience.

See the iOS project in Example/ for a simple example of how to use the library.

Apache 2.0