Question

Is there a built-in way in the iOS sdk to take an NSString containing HTML sequences

& amp;, & nbsp;, & lt;  (spaces added to avoid markdown interpretation)

etc., and translate those to ‘&’, ‘ ‘, ‘<‘ ? My string contains international UTF8 characters so I can’t convert to ascii.

Answer 1

As Michael Waterfall has commented on other, similar questions, there is no built-in function available, but have a look at his solution which is a new category for NSString.

It defines the following new methods, especially stringByDecodingHTMLEntities:

- (NSString *)stringByConvertingHTMLToPlainText;
- (NSString *)stringByDecodingHTMLEntities;
- (NSString *)stringByEncodingHTMLEntities;
- (NSString *)stringWithNewLinesAsBRs;
- (NSString *)stringByRemovingNewLinesAndWhitespace;