What's the point of -setFormatWidth: or -formatWidth from NSNumberFormatter?

Question

The documentation is hard to interpret on this topic. Does this value return me how many characters the calculated format string will contain? Or does it tell me how big actually that string is? Or can I tell it how big (in unit squares or "pixels") the output should be?

Maybe someone can point out what this methods do...

Answer 1

The -formatWidth getter method tells you how many characters the string will contain. The -setFormatWidth allows you to set that width.

The 'drawInRect' NSString extension can be used to constrain a string to a specific rectangle size.

Those same extensions have a method called 'sizeWithFont' that will tell you how big the rectangle needs to be to hold the string given a certain font.

See: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UIKit/Reference/NSString%5FUIKit%5FAdditions/Reference/Reference.html