Question

I’m writing a simple IRC client that I’m modeling after Twitter’s iOS app appearance. I’ve taken a screenshot of the Twitter app, for reference:

It looks like a simple table view with a few labels inside of each cell. So, in my app, I am programmatically creating a table and the cell formatting. My custom cell has only two labels in it, which I have positioned one on top of the other. The top label is a simple 1-liner. The bottom label I would like to contain longer messages, and need it to word-wrap to multiple lines while staying within my specified width.

How do I achieve this?

So far, I’ve tried explicitly setting the frame of the label to the dimensions that I want, but it does not word-wrap, if this is all I do. It just flows out of the cell horizontally. I then tried calling sizeToFit, within the tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath: function, for this label, but it appears to word-wrap at a very small width – the text wraps after like two or three letters and then flows out of the cell vertically.

I can’t seem to figure out how to get the text within the label to wrap after a specified width. Any ideas?

My custom cell class: https://github.com/ryancole/pound-client/blob/master/pound-client/views/MessageListCell.m

The cellForRowAtIndexPath function: https://github.com/ryancole/pound-client/blob/master/pound-client/controllers/MessageListViewController.m#L62-L84

Edit 1:

To demonstrate what happened when I set numberOfLines to 0, for unlimited, I have attached a screenshots of that being called. It wraps after a few characters, instead of first taking up the specified width of the UILabel’s frame. This is being set prior to called sizeToFit.

Answer 1

You need to set numberOfLines to the number of lines you want, or 0 which allows for an unlimited number of lines (the default is 1). You might also need to set the lineBreakMode to NSLineBreakByWordWrapping (although that might be the default).

After Edit: If you want the text to start at the top, then I think you’ll have to use variable height cells, and not set an explicit size for your custom cell. I did it this way in one of my projects:

-(CGFloat) tableView:(UITableView *)tableView heightForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    UILabel *label = [[UILabel alloc] init];
    label.numberOfLines = 0; // allows label to have as many lines as needed
    label.text = _objects[indexPath.row][@"detail2"];
    CGSize labelSize = [label.text sizeWithFont:label.font constrainedToSize:CGSizeMake(300, 300000) lineBreakMode:NSLineBreakByWordWrapping];
    CGFloat h = labelSize.height;
    return h + 50;
}

The label I create here, is just for calculating the height of the row, it’s discarded after this method ends. The width of the cell is determined by the 300 argument I have in the constrainedToSize: parameter. The +50 was just a fudge factor I added to get my cells looking right — you’d probably want to mess with that number to get what you want. In my custom cell class, I used initWithStyle:reuseIdentifier, and didn’t set any size.