Question

I have a complex long XHTML file, which contains CSS. Searching on google and on this site, I’ve found some libraries that can be useful on XHTML parsing:

• NSXMLParser
• TBXML
• And some others

However, I’m wondering if there is any library for iPhone that can convert a xhtml + css document to a NSAttributedString (only the text, of course).

I have been thinking on that problem, and I have had some ideas, but I think it won’t be very efficient. My main idea is formed by this steps:

• Detect on the XTHML file all tags with an id or class attribute and get the range of the string where they have effect (I cannot achieve this).

• Save all the CSS attributes on a NSDictionary, with more NSDictionary objects inside. Something like this:

  mainDict {
      object: dictionary {
           object: @"#00ff00"
           key: @"color"
           object: @"1em"
           key: @"font-size"
      }
      key: @"a id"
      object: anotherDictionary {
          ...
      }
      key: @"another id"
  }
  

• Convert these CSS attributes dictionary on the NSAttributedStringattributes dictionary.

I know that this is complex, and I don’t need you to provide the code (of course, if you provide it, it would be great), I only want the link to a library or, if it doesn’t exist, some advice for create a parser myself.

Of course, if you need some more information, ask by comments.

Thanks you!!

Answer 1

It depends on your needs if this will do what you want, but DTCoreText has an HTML -> NSAttributedString converter. It’s very specific for what DTCoreText wants to / needs to do, but it might at least point you in the right direction.