iphone bullet point list

Question

Is there any way to make a bullet point list in iphone?

If you copy and paste a bullet point list into a UITextView in IB then it shows up. Is there anyway to do this programatically?

Thank you

Tom

Answer 1

As far as I know the only way to archive this (and almost any other formatted rich-text) on the iPhone is to use a UIWebView and insert HTML-Code like this:

<ul>
     <li>Bullet</li>
</ul>

In response to your comment, UIWebViews can be "beautified" by the following peace of code:

for(UIView* v in webView.subviews){
    if([v isKindOfClass:[UIScrollView class] ]){

        //disable bouncing
        UIScrollView* sv = (UIScrollView*) v;
        sv.alwaysBounceVertical = NO;
        sv.alwaysBounceHorizontal = NO;

        //disable scroll-shadows
        for (UIView *subView in [sv subviews])
            if ([[[subView class] description] isEqualToString:@"UIImageView"])
                subView.hidden = YES;
    }
}

I haven't submitted this yet but I guess it should be "AppStore safe".

Answer 2

The "bullet" character is at Unicode code point U+2022. You can use it in a string with @"\u2022" or [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%C", 0x2022].

The "line feed" character is at Unicode code point U+000A, and is used as UIKit's newline character. You can use it in a string with @"\n".

For example, if you had an array of strings, you could make a bulleted list with something like this:

NSArray * items = ...;
NSMutableString * bulletList = [NSMutableString stringWithCapacity:items.count*30];
for (NSString * s in items)
{
  [bulletList appendFormat:@"\u2022 %@\n", s];
}
textView.text = bulletList;

It won't indent lines like a "proper" word processor. "Bad things" will happen if your list items include newline characters (but what did you expect?).

(Apple doesn't guarantee that "\uXXXX" escapes work in NSString literals, but in practice they do if you use Apple's compiler.)