I am stuck with a small issue.
I need to use a sentence which will have first two words bold and last two words italic. Like:
I am using an Objective C Developer.
How to do that. Is this possible in Objective C?
7 Answers
For iOS7 you can use this:
NSString * htmlString = @"<html><body> Some html string </body></html>"; NSAttributedString * attrStr = [[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithData:[htmlString dataUsingEncoding:NSUnicodeStringEncoding] options:@{ NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute: NSHTMLTextDocumentType } documentAttributes:nil error:nil]; UILabel * myLabel = [UILabel alloc] init]; myLabel.attributedText = attrStr; 
Comments
Apple recommends that for small amounts of styled text, you should use a web view, and display the text marked up in HTML and formatted with CSS, etc.
Personally I've never taken that advice, as I would consider a UI full of web views to be a bit over kill.
There is the Core Text framework, if you want a little more control over your text and want to use attributed strings.
It isn't a one-liner though. Using core text requires quite a lot of code.
I have written a core text view that will display tappable URL links inline with text, but I have not given it arbitrary formatting support. If you're interested in showing links within text, then check it out: https://github.com/jasarien/CoreTextHyperlinkView
You may be interested in Oliver Drobnik's rich text view, which is based on Core Text too. As far as I know, you can feed it HTML and it'll produce a native view containing your formatted text. Very useful. It can be found here: https://github.com/Cocoanetics/DTCoreText
2 Comments
TechBee
Thanks Jasarien.I am trying this out.
Almas Adilbek
The link for Oliver Drobnik's rich text view is broken!
I've written a very small class called THMultiPartLabel to help me accomplish this sort of thing - you can find it on GitHub here. It's based heavily on Jason's answer to a similar question here. Using this class, you'd implement your example like so:
UIFont *normal = [UIFont systemFontOfSize:20]; UIFont *bold = [UIFont boldSystemFontOfSize:20]; UIFont *italic = [UIFont italicSystemFontOfSize:20]; NSArray *fonts = [NSArray arrayWithObjects: normal, bold, normal, italic, normal nil]; THMultiPartLabel *mpLabel = [[THMultiPartLabel alloc] initWithOffsetX:0 Y:0 defaultFonts:fonts]; [mpLabel updateText:@"I ", @"am using ", @"an ", @"Objective C ", "Developer", nil]; 
1 Comment
Deepak G M
How do you expect people to use this for longer texts? A solution should be generic in nature that can cater to a larger text but at the same time should be easier to use. I am not giving a thumbs down for this answer since we should do so only if this does not answer the query but this is in no way a acceptable solution. Sorry for that but thats my opinion
You should have a look at Core Text.
Here are some useful resources:
- Befriending Core Text on Cocoanetics.com
- Core Text Reference Collection - official Apple documentation
- SimpleTextInput - Example app by Apple
- CoreTextPageViewer - Example app by Apple
Comments
You can't do both with the standard UILabel implementation. But you can do one or the other.
myLabel.font = [UIFont fontWithName:@"TrebuchetMS-Bold" size:18]; 
Comments
Your best option is probably to replace the UILabel with a UIWebView and use HTML to do the formatting.
[EDIT]
If you have lots of them and think there is too much of a performance hit, you can (from iOS 3.2 onwards) also consider NSAttributedString, although that will be a lot more coding.
3 Comments
Wayne Hartman
Oi, don't use a
UIWebView for something that small. The UIWebView is a very expensive object. Depending on his requirements, he's better off creating separate labels or creating a static image. There are no clear choices here, mostly because the use case isn't really specified, but I would not use a UIWebView for this.
Roger
For a lot of (simple) cases there is no noticeable performance hit with the UIWebView but I agree it's not necessarily the right solution without knowing more about the use case.
TechBee
Thanks Roger, actually I would like to go with CoreText. Seems convincing to me.
Since iOS 6 you can use NSAttributedString with an UILabel, a NSAttributedString takes a NSString as an argument in one of its contructors, after that you can specify which ranges of this string has a particular text style.
You can find a good example on how to do it on iOS 6 here: http://weblog.invasivecode.com/post/31931916393/introduction-to-nsattributedstring-for-ios-6
If you what something backwards compatible, I'm strongly recommend the OHAttributedLabel which can be found here: https://github.com/AliSoftware/OHAttributedLabel
Note: OHAttributedLabel also allows the usage of html markup to style your label text.
UIlabel? if so, first one with bold style and the other one with italic style.