iPhone UIColor in Plist file - iphone

Question

Is that possible to save colorcodes in Plist file somehow?
Do I have to represent them in string? and then can I create colors from them?
I saw a similar thread here about this but it has no answer yet
What could be done?

Answer 1

I can give you a suggestion. Instead of storing the color names you can store the RGB values in a array and store that array in each row in the plist.
key - Red
Type - Array
value - 1.0,0.0,0.0
Retrieve the array for each key.
NSArray *colorsArray = [dictionaryFromPlist objectForKey:#"Red"];
UIColor *mycolor = [UIColor colorWithRed:[[colorsArray objectAtIndex:0] floatValue]
green:[[colorsArray objectAtIndex:1] floatValue]
blue:[[colorsArray objectAtIndex:2] floatValue]
alpha:1.0];
Just my thought..

Answer 2

UIColor (see here) conforms to the NSCoding protocol (see here) meaning you can write them out to a plist if you do it using NSCoding.
There is a great tutorial here about saving and restoring your app data using NSCoding

Answer 3

You can use NSKeyedArchiver which inherits from NSCoder
NSData *data = [NSKeyedArchiver archivedDataWithRootObject:[UIColor purpleColor]];
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] registerDefaults:#{#"color": data}];
To get the color back out you would use NSKeyedUnarchiver:
NSDictionary *dict = [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] dictionaryRepresentation];
NSLog(#"%#", [NSKeyedUnarchiver unarchiveObjectWithData: dict[#"color"]]);

Answer 4

To preserve human readability, I did a category for this:
#implementation UIColor (EPPZRepresenter)
NSString *NSStringFromUIColor(UIColor *color)
{
const CGFloat *components = CGColorGetComponents(color.CGColor);
return [NSString stringWithFormat:#"[%f, %f, %f, %f]",
components[0],
components[1],
components[2],
components[3]];
}
UIColor *UIColorFromNSString(NSString *string)
{
NSString *componentsString = [[string stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:#"[" withString:#""] stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:#"]" withString:#""];
NSArray *components = [componentsString componentsSeparatedByString:#", "];
return [UIColor colorWithRed:[(NSString*)components[0] floatValue]
green:[(NSString*)components[1] floatValue]
blue:[(NSString*)components[2] floatValue]
alpha:[(NSString*)components[3] floatValue]];
}
#end
The same formatting that is used by NSStringFromCGAffineTransform. This is actually a part of a bigger scale plist object representer in [eppz!kit at GitHub][1].