How to create PublicKey from PEM?

I'm pretty new to RSA Keys and Certificates and all of that. So I'm getting a PEM File from a network request, I understand the PEM file is basically the certificate without header and footer, so essentially I have a string. I need to create a PublicKey from that in order to Encrypt some text, but I think I'm doing something wrong. This is my code so far, I have talked to other teams (Android) and when they print out the Encrypted Data, they are getting a regular String and I'm getting lots of weird characters. Thanks in advance guys! (:

func encryptBase64(text: String, certificateStr: String) throws -> Data {
    let encryptionError = EncrpytionError(message: "There has been an issue with encryption")

    guard
        let certData = Data(base64Encoded: certificateStr),
        let certificate = SecCertificateCreateWithData(nil, certData as CFData),
        let publicKey = SecCertificateCopyKey(certificate)
    else {
        throw encryptionError
    }

    let algorithm: SecKeyAlgorithm = .rsaEncryptionOAEPSHA256AESGCM

    guard SecKeyIsAlgorithmSupported(publicKey, .encrypt, algorithm) else {
        throw encryptionError
    }
    guard let cipherText = SecKeyCreateEncryptedData(
        publicKey,
        algorithm,
        text.data(using: .utf8)! as CFData, nil)
    else {
        throw encryptionError
    }
    return cipherText as Data
}

And when I try to print cipherText as a String using

let encryptedString = String(decoding: encryptedData, as: UTF8.self)

I just get this weird thing:

"D�aj�\\m꒤h,�A�{��8�~�\nY\u0003F�Cˤ�@��\"�\u0018�\u0007\u001fX@VC�U_��E\u0005dž1���X��\/4Px��P\u0016�8}% ��<��@�I_�K\u000e�\bR*�� ���斋�7,�%���F^q�\u0000\\�'�ZTD\u0013Q�_\u0010\u001f>i]&��B���@1\u0006\b��E\u0004�F���yS\u0013�3����SB)��m\u0017%��5ʲ����s\u0003��r�&�?�8b��W@\u001e��؞ۡ��8�s~��ӹ�u\"�2��U�&\b�3XV���˔Y��xt[\fm&P:\\�\f� y��6jy"

Android team is doing something like this using Kotlin:

private fun extractPublicKey(certificateString: String): PublicKey {
            val encodedCertificateBytes = certificateString.toByteArray()
            val decodedCertificateBytes = Base64.decode(encodedCertificateBytes, Base64.DEFAULT)
            val inStream = decodedCertificateBytes.inputStream()
            val certificateFactory = CertificateFactory.getInstance("X.509")
            val certificate = certificateFactory.generateCertificate(inStream)
            inStream.close()
            return certificate.publicKey
}