I am trying to accomplish the following:
Read and Parse the text in a UITextField. Identify all the numbers in the UITextField and convert these into hyperlinks.
When these hyperlinks are clicked perform a custom action, which is to display a UIActionSheet and based on the selection assign the number (in the hyperlink) to another UITextField instance
For example if the UITextField has the text - "This is a sample test with number 123445 and more numbers 44555, 66777".
I should be able to parse the above text, detect all three numbers and add hyperlinks to them.
For the first part (parsing) I found out that there is a NSRegularExpression class that can be used to detect patterns in a text. But I could not find a way of adding hyperlinks to the matched numbers. I tried looking at Three20 documentation and could not figure out a way. Even tried the answer in this link - Just how to you use TTStyledTextLabel? but it only auto detects URLs and adds hyperlinks to them, I want to add hyperlinks to any custom text.
Can someone please help me with this. Please do not ask me to use WebView. I would really appreciate some code snippets. Thanks in advance. I am using xCode4.
If you don't need the text to be user-editable directly, you may use my OHAttributedLabel class to achieve this. (here on github)
This allows you to display any NSAttributedString and can also autodetect links, phone numbers and everything Apple's NSDataDetector class is able to detect. You can also add custom links to your label on any part of the text.
See the sample project included in my github repository for more details.
It is very customizable, both for link colors, underline style, action to perform when a link is tapped, which link types it should autodetect, and you can add any custom links and style you need on the text.
Related
I'm using DTCoreText DTAttributedTextView in my app to highlight the urls in my text. My other criteria is to be able to select by tapping and holding similar to UITextView. However, DTAttributedTextView doesn't seem to to use a UITextView as a placeholder. Anybody has an idea how I can achieve this?
Thanks
That's a feature that's only available via the paid version of DTCoreText.
from the github page
This is useful for drawing simple rich text like any HTML document without having to use a UIWebView. For text selection and highlighting (as you might need for an Editor or Reader) there is the commercial DTRichTextEditor component which can be purchased in the Cocoanetics Parts Store.
I'd like to use the text correction ui element in my own UIView.
Is this allowed & possible? If so, how can I use the element?
Clarification: I don't want to use it as a text correction feature.
I want to use it as UI elements to show multiple (dismissable) tags on a UIView to show & modify predicate settings.
You can use UIMenuController, which might be close to what you want (it's the thing that shows the Cut/Copy/Paste/Replace menu in text fields). See the CopyPasteTile and Touches sample code for details.
If you actually mean the thing that pops up with spelling completion suggestions, then no, you can't easily use it. You'll have to create custom buttons as you mentioned above. But, try downloading and running UIKit Artwork Extractor to help with getting UIKit artwork to match the look of your custom buttons.
Text correction? Do you meant the auto-complete / correct features you get when you type text on iOS? If so, you get that for free as part of UITextField or UITextView, so the answer would be yes. You can define exactly what you want corrected as part of the properties of those two classes.
What I am trying to do is create tooltip functionality so that certain words in my instructional app can be tapped and the definition pops up. For the popup part I plan on using code from “AFInformationView” which provides bubbles on the iPhone.
The part I'm struggling with is how to associate A particular word's location with the bubble. Currently I have the text on a UILabel that is on a custom UITableCell. Since I calculate the row height on the fly with:
[textToUse sizeWithFont:[UIFont systemFontOfSize:FONT_SIZE] constrainedToSize:CGSizeMake(stop-start, 500)];
I'm not sure what the coordinates for a specific word will be. I was thinking that if I created a custom DataDetectorType that could be the fix.
If anyone knows how to do this or has any other ideas I would be happy to hear them.
Thanks,
Andrew
I didn't create a custom UIDataDetectorTypes but Craig Hockenberry did something like it with his TwitterrificTouch.
He uses regular expressions to detect links and other things. I provide it with my keywords and then they become tappable. He places buttons on top of the matching text from the underlying labels. You can google a lot of posts that talk about "putting transparent buttons on top" of various things but Craig's code is the only example/working code I could find.
Here is the link:
http://furbo.org/2008/10/07/fancy-uilabels/
I don't think this is possible. The (few) Data Detector types that the iPhone currently supports are hard-coded with a integer type id. There does not seem to be a mechanism to extends that list of types.
File a feature request in their bug tracker. I will do the same.
AFAIK, you can't create custom data detectors.
The best approach for this sort of thing seems to be using UIWebViews. At least that's what I did. However, you shouldn't use a UIWebView inside a UITableViewCell. In fact, no subview of a UITableViewCell should respond to user input. So I think the best approach would be to display a UIWebView when the cell is tapped.
UIWebViews could be a possible approach but on scrolling you should consider that the whole text should be parsed to detect the words.You could use HTMl tags to make them blue and provide the links.But how could i then assign a custom behavior then opening in safari?
If you want custom data detector you could write an extractor method to primarly patch the links with help of NSregularExpression. For example
NSString regex = #"(http|https|fb)://((\w)|([0-9]*)|([-|_]))+(\.|/)"; to patch alll the links including Facebook URLs inside text like fb://friends.
Then you could use NSattributedString yo mark the links with different colors etc.
ThreeTwenty has a great library called TTTAttributedLabel where you could assign links to certain parts of a text. I also scrolls quite fast if you use it in tableviews
https://github.com/mattt/TTTAttributedLabel
I am creating a dictionary-style app that presents a tableview full of words, and when a word is selected, a UITextView is displayed that shows the definition of the word. What I would like to do is add a line that says "See also: synonym1, synonym2" where synonym1 and synonym2 are links that will take the user to the definition for the synonym that is touched.
What is the best way to add these dynamic links? Buttons? Somehow add a small UIWebView a UItable on the fly?
Thanks!
I would replace your UITextView with a UIWebView and use that contain your description text and your links. It's fairly trivial to generate HTML on the fly for something like that.
You could register a custom URL scheme for your app, or you could intercept links as they're clicked.
If your links are always grouped together there's no reason why you couldn't use a bunch of UIButtons inside a custom view, but then you'd have to handle layout and wrapping on your own. It seems a lot easier to do it in HTML.
I am making a table which has a row that looks like the "To:" line in the Apple Mail app. When you add new people to Mail from your address book, their name shows up in a rounded button.
I can create the button and use sizeToFit to make it fit snugly around the text - no problem.
However, once I do that, I can't figure out how wide the button has become. Is there an easy way to just stick a bunch of buttons in a cell and have it wrap as necessary automatically, or do I have to manually calculate the width and if it goes beyond the end of the screen, move to the next row?
Also, how do you get the width of a sizeToFit'ted button? button.frame returns null. Most perplexing.
You might want to take a look at Joe Hewitt's three20 project, a collection of custom UI elements for the iPhone that were used in the development of the Facebook app.
The two classes you would be particularly interested are TTMessageController and TTPickerTextField.
From the project site:
TTMessageController emulates the
message composer in Apple's Mail app.
You can customize it to send any kind
of message you want. Include your own
set of message fields, or use the
standard "To:" and "Subject:".
Recipient names can be autocompleted
from a data source that you provide.
TTPickerTextField is a type-ahead
UITextField. As you type it searches a
data source, and it adds bubbles into
the flow of text when you choose a
type-ahead option. I use this in
TTMessageController for selecting the
names of message recipients.