Question

In a UITableView’s index scroller (the scroller on the right side containing the chars for each section) how do I display a mix of English characters and say Japanese characters? Is there a way to grab the first char of an NSString and then check to see if it’s actually part of a é or something (since é is 2 unicode characters — e + `). Any code snippets would be very helpful. By just doing the first character, it ends up displays random characters like “=” or “~” instead of the japanese character

Thanks!

NOTE: I’m not using the UILocalizedIndexedCollation because I am using CoreData’s FetchResultsController. In many places online I’ve read that you can’t really use both.

EDIT: I can get the character now, however the tableview index doesn’t seem to render them properly. Does anyone have something like Japanese characters displaying in the tableview index?

Answer 1

The most solid way is to use the NSString methods that are sensitive to these characters. You would probably be interested in the WWDC2011 – Session 128 – Advanced Text Processing video. It talks extensively about just this subject. Pay attention to the part about “Composed Character Sequences”

Based on the information presented there you could probably do something like this:

#warning I haven't tested this thoroughly
NSString *string = @"Hello";
__block NSString *firstCharacterSequence = nil;
[string enumerateSubstringsInRange:NSMakeRange(0, string.length) 
                           options:NSStringEnumerationByComposedCharacterSequences 
                        usingBlock:^(NSString *substring, NSRange substringRange, NSRange enclosingRange, BOOL *stop){
                            firstCharacterSequence = substring;
                            *stop = YES;
                        }];
NSLog(@"%@",firstCharacterSequence);