Question

I searched, but surprisingly couldn’t find an answer.

I have a long NSString that I want to shorten. I want the maximum length to be around 20 characters. I read somewhere that the best solution is to use substringWithRange. Is this the best way to truncate a string?

NSRange stringRange = {0,20};
NSString *myString = @"This is a string, it's a very long string, it's a very long string indeed";
NSString *shortString = [myString substringWithRange:stringRange];

It seems a little delicate (crashes if the string is shorter than the maximum length). I’m also not sure if it’s Unicode-safe. Is there a better way to do it? Does anyone have a nice category for this?

Answer 1

Actually the part about being “Unicode safe” was dead on, as many characters combine in unicode which the suggested answers don’t consider.

For example, if you want to type é. One way of doing it is by typing “e”(0x65)+combining accent” ́”(0x301). Now, if you type “café” like this and truncate 4 chars, you’ll get “cafe”. This might cause problems in some places.

If you don’t care about this, other answers work fine. Otherwise, do this:

// define the range you're interested in
NSRange stringRange = {0, MIN([myString length], 20)};

// adjust the range to include dependent chars
stringRange = [myString rangeOfComposedCharacterSequencesForRange:stringRange];

// Now you can create the short string
NSString *shortString = [myString substringWithRange:stringRange];

Note that in this way your range might be longer than your initial range length. In the café example above, your range will expand to a length of 5, even though you still have 4 “glyphs”. If you absolutely need to have a length less than what you indicated, you need to check for this.