Subscript and Superscripts in CDATA of an xml file. Using UILabel to display the parsed XML contents - iphone

Question

I need to display subscripts and superscripts (only arabic numerals) within a UILabel. The data is taken from an XML file. Here is the snippet of XML file:
<text><![CDATA[Hello World X\u00B2 World Hello]]></text>
Its supposed to display X2 (2 as superscript). When I read the string from the NSXMLParser and display it in the UILabel, it displays it as X\u00B2. Any ideas on how to make it work?

Answer 1

I think you can do something like this, assuming the CDATA contents have been read into an NSString and passed into this function:
-(NSString *)removeUnicodeEscapes:(NSString *)stringWithUnicodeEscapes {
unichar codeValue;
NSMutableString *result = [stringWithUnicodeEscapes mutableCopy];
NSRange unicodeLocation = [result rangeOfString:#"\\u"];
while (unicodeLocation.location != NSNotFound) {
// Get the 4-character hex code
NSRange charCodeRange = NSMakeRange(unicodeLocation.location + 2, 4);
NSString *charCode = [result substringWithRange:charCodeRange];
[[NSScanner scannerWithString:charCode] scanHexInt:&codeValue];
// Convert it to an NSString and replace in original string
NSString *unicodeChar = [NSString stringWithFormat:%C", codeValue];
NSRange replacementRange = NSMakeRange(unicodeLocation.location, 6);
[result replaceCharactersInRange:replacementRange withString:unicodeChar];
unicodeLocation = [result rangeOfString:#"\\u"];
}
return result;
}
I haven't had a chance to try this out, but I think the basic approach would work

Answer 2

\u00B2 is not any sort of XML encoding for characters. Apparently your data source has defined their own encoding scheme (which, frankly, is pretty stupid as XML is capable of encoding these directly, using entities outside of CDATA blocks).
In any case, you'll have to write your own parser that handles \u#### and converts that to the correct character.

Answer 3

I asked the question to my colleague and he gave me a nice and simple workaround. Am describing it here, in case others also get stuck at this.
Firstly goto this link. It has a list of all subscripts and superscripts. For example, in my case, I clicked on "superscript 0". In the following HTML page detailing "superscript 0", goto "Java Data" section and copy the "⁰". You can either place this directly in XML or write a simple regex in obj-c to replace \u00B2 with "⁰". And you will get nice X⁰. Do the same fro anyother superscript or subscript that you might want to display.