About these classes

About these classes

OHAttributedLabel

This class allows you to use a** UILabel with NSAttributedStrings**, in order to display styled text with mixed style (mixed fonts, color, size, ...) in a unique label. It is a subclass of UILabel, which adds an attributedText property so you can use it in place of a standard UILabel directly. Simply use the attributedText property instead of the text property to set and get the NSAttributedString to display.

This class also support hyperlinks and URLs. It can automatically detect links in your text, color them and make them touchable; you can also add "custom links" in your text by attaching an URL to a range of your text and thus make it touchable, and even then catch the event of a touch on a link to act as you wish to.

NSAttributedString and NSTextChecking additions

In addition to this OHAttributedLabel class, you will also find a category of NS(Mutable)AttributedString to ease creation and manipulation of common attributes of NSAttributedString (to easily change the font, style, color, ... of a range of the string). See the header file NSAttributedString+Attributes.h for a list of those comodity methods.

There is also a category for NSTextCheckingResult that adds the extendedURL property. This property returns the same value as the URL value for standard link cases, and return a formatted Maps URL for NSTextCheckingTypeAddress link types, that will open Google Maps in iOS version before 6.0 and the Apple's Maps application in iOS 6.0 and later.

OHASTagParsers and simple tags support

The library also comes with very simple tag parsers to help you build NSAttributedStrings easily using very simple tags.

• the class OHASTagParserHTML can parse simple HTML tags like <b> and <u> to make bold and underlined text, change the font color using <font color='…'>, etc

• the class OHASTagParserBasicMarkup can parse simple markup like *bold text*, _underlined text_ and change the font color using markup like {red|some red text} or {#ff6600|Yeah}.

    // Example 1:
    htmlLabel.attributedText = [OHASTagParserHTML attributedStringByReplacingTagsInAttributedString:htmlLabel.attributedText];
  
    // Example 2:
    NSMutableAttributedString* mas = [NSMutableAttributedString attributedStringWithString:@"Hello *you*!"];
    [OHASTagParserBasicMarkup replaceTagsInAttributedString:mas];
  

Note that OHASTagParserHTML is intended to be a very simple tool only to help you build attributed string easier: this is not intended to be a real and complete HTML interpreter, and will never be. For improvements of this feature, like adding other tags or markup languages, refer to issue #88)

UIApperance support

The OHAttributedLabel class support the UIAppearance proxy API (available since iOS5). See selectors and properties marked using the UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR in the header.

This means that if you are targetting iOS5, you can customize all of your OHAttributedLabel links color and underline style to fit your application design, only in one call at the beginning of your application, instead of having to customize these for each instance.

For example, your could implement this in your application:didFinishLoadingWithOptions: delegate method to make all your OHAttributedLabel instances in your whole app display links in green and without underline instead of the default underlined blue:

- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions
{
    [ [OHAttributedLabel appearance] setLinkColor:[UIColor colorWithRed:0.0 green:0.4 blue:0.0 alpha:1.0] ];
    [ [OHAttributedLabel appearance] setLinkUnderlineStyle:kCTUnderlineStyleNone ];
    return YES;
}