NSString: newline escape in plist

Question

I'm writing a property list to be in the resources bundle of my application. An NSString object in the plist needs to have line-breaks in it. I tried \n, but that doesn't work. What do I do to have newlines in my string in the plist?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Edit your plist using a text editor instead of Xcode's plist editor. Then you simply put line breaks in your strings directly:

<string>foo
bar</string>

Answer 2

I tried that but It doesn't work as well :( Any ideas?

Answer 3

If you're editing the plist in Xcode's inbuild plist editor, you can press option-return to enter a line break within a string value.

Answer 4

a little late, but i discovered the same issue and i also discovered a fix or workaround. so for anyone who stumbles on this will get an answer :)

so the problem is when you read a string from a file, \n will be 2 characters unlike in xcode the compiler will recognize \n as one.

so i extended the NSString class like this:

"NSString+newLineToString.h":

@interface NSString(newLineToString)    
-(NSString*)newLineToString;   
@end

"NSString+newLineToString.m":

#import "NSString+newLineToString.h"

@implementation NSString(newLineToString)

-(NSString*)newLineToString
{
    NSString *string = @"";
    NSArray *chunks = [self componentsSeparatedByString: @"\\n"];

    for(id str in chunks){
        if([string isEqualToString:@""]){
            string = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@",str];
        }else{
            string = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@\n%@",string,str];
        }

    }
    return string;
} 
@end

How to use it:

rootDict = [[NSDictionary alloc]initWithContentsOfFile:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"yourFile" ofType:@"plist"]];

NSString *string = [[rootDict objectForKey:@"myString"] newLineToString];

its quick and dirty, be aware that \\n in your file will not be recognize as \n so if you need to write \n on text you have to modify the method :)

Answer 5

I found a simpler solution:

NSString *newString = [oldString stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"\\n" withString:@"\n"];

It seems the string reader escapes all characters that need to be escaped such that the text from the plist is rendered verbatim. This code effectively drops the extra escape.