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Answer 1

A:

A text view owns a text storage, which is a kind of mutable attributed string. You can replace an empty range with the string you want to insert to insert it.

Of course, you will need to parse the HTML to determine where to insert it.

Peter Hosey 2010-09-16 18:54:12

I am aware of that - i am asking how I determine where I need to insert it?

David Schiefer 2010-09-16 19:08:23

You asked how to insert text. That's the question I answered. How to parse HTML is a different question.

Peter Hosey 2010-09-16 19:13:06

Answer 2

A:

Having not written an HTML editor before, I'm not entirely sure of the best approach for this. However, you'll obviously need some way of parsing the HTML. Since you're using Cocoa, you've got a few options.

NSXMLParser This is a SAX-style event -driven parser. You implement NSXMLParserDelegate, which has methods that get called when the parser encounters various XML components (elements, attributes, text, etc.)
NSXML This is a tree-based XML parser, and I'm not sure how well it plays with HTML. It does, however, have the advantage of being able to run XPath queries which can be very helpful when you're looking for a specific element.
libxml This is a C library which operates at a much lower level than Cocoa. However, it is by far the most capable of the three. It can work in both an event-driven mode and a tree-oriented mode. Plus, it also has HTML-specific capabilities. Unfortunately, it is not that friendly to use. You'll find yourself casting stuff between C strings and NSString objects a lot.
However, I've used libxml extensively in an iOS app for parsing XML and it works beautifully once you get used to the C-style interface. I'm sure it works just as nicely on Mac OS X, too. This is probably what I'd recommend for your problem.

Alex 2010-09-18 15:02:52

All three of these rely on the input being valid XML (i.e., XHTML). SGML-based HTML, including HTML 5 and unvalidated “tag soup” (not that these are mutually exclusive), will almost certainly cause an XML parser to choke and return an error rather than give you a complete parse of the document.

Peter Hosey 2010-09-18 20:21:43

I do use NSXMLParser, but only for reading META Tags and get the path for the CSS Sheet. All I need to know is how I can insert text between two tags? so kindof like NSTextView's `insertText:` method, but between tags.

David Schiefer 2010-09-19 10:33:26

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Cocoa - Insert text between tags

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