Objective-C: Formatting text in a string object within a plist

Question

Hello - I am a new objective-c/iPhone developer and am wondering if there is any way to apply formatting to text within a string in a plist?

I have a plist that is an array of dictionaries. Each dictionary contains a few string objects, some of which I would like to contain lists and paragraphs of information. I am calling these strings and displaying them via labels in the UI.

Similar to using < li> and < /li> or < b> and < /b> in html, I would like to be able to specify parts of a string to be formatted when displayed as a bulleted list, bold, italic, etc.. How could this be accomplished?

With the help of some kind users on this site, I was able to embed the < li> and < b> tags within the xml plist file, however this just resulted in literally printing the tags on the screen.

Thanks in advance for your help!!

Answer 1

It doesn't sound like the fact that your strings are in a plist has much to do with the issue. You'll be storing them that way regardless. But if you want to render HTML-like formatting inside your UI, you have two choices:

1. Parse the data into an NSAttributedString, which is available starting in iOS 3.2. I believe you'll have to figure out how to get from the HTML representation to the right attributes in the string.
2. Use a UIWebView and render your HTML directly. This sounds heavyweight, esp for labels, and it probably would be, but you could try.

(Gist here is that there isn't a trivial answer to your question-- the Cocoa frameworks don't natively speak much HTML, and intra-string formatting isn't something that's necessarily easily done.)

Answer 2

For HTML markup to work, you'll need to display the text in a UIWebView, not a UILabel. Check out the UIWebView documentation here.

Update: In response to the other answer, I don't believe UILabel will correctly display an NSAttributedString even on iOS 4. Apple's recommended approach to doing styled text is to use a UIWebView (or draw the text yourself using Core Text, which is significantly more complicated).