Objective-C: How to replace HTML entities?

Question

Hi,

I'm getting text from Internet and it contains html entities (i.e. ó = ó). I want to show this text into a custom iPhone cell.

I've tried to use a UIWebView into my custom cell but I prefer to use a multiline UILabel. The problem is I can't find any way of replacing these HTML entities.

Answer 1

Can you just use NSMutableString's replaceOccurrencesOfString:withString:options:range: method?

Answer 2

Hi Arielcamus,

you are not the first with this question. Take a look at this thread:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1105169/html-character-decoding-in-objective-c-cocoa

Answer 3

Google Toolbox for Mac includes an iPhone-compatible NSString addition that will do this for you: gtm_stringByUnescapingFromHTML defined in GTMNSString+HTML.h and GTMNSString+HTML.m. If you comment out the calls to _GTMDevLog and #import "GTMDefines.h" in the .m you only need to add these two files to your project.

Answer 4

To expand on Matt Stevens answer (since I'm not allowed to comment yet), you don't need to comment out _GTMDevLog, as it is intentionally set up so that you can #define it yourself to whatever you want.

Answer 5

Check out my NSString category for HTML. Here are the methods available:

- (NSString *)stringByConvertingHTMLToPlainText;
- (NSString *)stringByDecodingHTMLEntities;
- (NSString *)stringByEncodingHTMLEntities;
- (NSString *)stringWithNewLinesAsBRs;
- (NSString *)stringByRemovingNewLinesAndWhitespace;