How to store text as paragraphs in SQLite database in a iPhone app? - iphone

Question

In my iPhone app, I have a requirement to store a huge amount of text. I have paragraphs of text to be stored in my database along with the newline characters.
What should I do to store the text as paragraphs in SQLite database?
For example, I want to store paragraphs like the ones below in:
(the mother of the faithful believers) The commencement of the Divine Inspiration to Allah's Apostle was in the form of good dreams which came true like bright day light, and then the love of seclusion was bestowed upon him. He used to go in seclusion in the cave of Hira where he used to worship (Allah alone) continuously for many days before his desire to see his family. He used to take with him the journey food for the stay and then come back to (his wife) Khadija to take his food like-wise again till suddenly the Truth descended upon him while he was in the cave of Hira. The angel came to him and asked him to read. The Prophet replied, "I do not know how to read.
The Prophet added, "The angel caught me (forcefully) and pressed me so hard that I could not bear it any more. He then released me and again asked me to read and I replied, 'I do not know how to read.'
Basically I want to save the paragraphs in database in the same format with carriage returns.

Answer 1

It depends on what you mean by huge and how you're planning on showing the data. The SQLite TEXT field, by default, can store 1 billion bytes.
You could in theory store all of it in a TEXT field in SQLite, then render it in a UIScrollView (or whatever it is you're using to render) and check the performance, memory usage, etc.
If the performance is unacceptable, you can try "chunking" the text into multiple rows and displaying only the records of the text required for the UI.
See the SQLite Limits document:
Maximum length of a string or BLOB
The maximum number of bytes in a string or BLOB in SQLite is defined by
the preprocessor macro
SQLITE_MAX_LENGTH. The default value
of this macro is 1 billion (1 thousand
million or 1,000,000,000). You can
raise or lower this value at
compile-time using a command-line
option like this:
-DSQLITE_MAX_LENGTH=123456789

Answer 2

On the face of it, SQLite doesn't treat newlines any differently than other characters; you can just store the test as-is.
The issue, though, is why are you storing large volumes of raw text in SQLite? If you want to search it or organize it somehow, SQLite (nor Core Data) is probably not the best choice without first massaging the text into some other form. Or, alternatively, you'd want to store the raw text on disk then keep some kind of searchable index in the database.

Answer 3

My suggestion would be if you want to display your text in a webview then add HTML tags to your text.So in that way you can add paragraphs,New lines and many other effects to your text.
Thanks

Answer 4

so do you want to split the text into paragraph and store each in its own row like:
(paragraph_number, text_of_paragraph)
that would be:
create table paragraphs (paragraph_number, text_of_paragraph);
then in what ever language you use split the text into a list of (pn, tp) named l and do like:
executemany("insert into paragraphs values (?, ?)", l)
or do like:
for p in l:
execute("insert into paragraphs values (?, ?)", p)

Answer 5

i would use HTML to represent my paragraphs (i.e)
Saving the Text
<div>
<p>(the mother of the faithful believers) The commencement of the Divine Inspiration to Allah's Apostle was in the form of good dreams which came true like bright day light, and then the love of seclusion was bestowed upon him. He used to go in seclusion in the cave of Hira where he used to worship (Allah alone) continuously for many days before his desire to see his family. He used to take with him the journey food for the stay and then come back to (his wife) Khadija to take his food like-wise again till suddenly the Truth descended upon him while he was in the cave of Hira. The angel came to him and asked him to read. The Prophet replied, "I do not know how to read.</p>
<p>The Prophet added, "The angel caught me (forcefully) and pressed me so hard that I could not bear it any more. He then released me and again asked me to read and I replied, 'I do not know how to read.</p>
</div>
Loading the Paragraphs
I would load them inside a UIWebView as html, you can save the HTML into a file in the app sandbox let's say Paragraph1.HTML load it as the following:
// this is a user defined method
-(void)loadDocument:(NSString*)documentName inView:(UIWebView*)webView
{
NSURL *url = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:sFilePath];// Path of the HTML File
NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
[web loadRequest:request];
}
dispose the File after loading it, this will save you much time and space.
Good luck.