Objective-C: How to replace HTML entities? [duplicate]

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• Objective C HTML escape/unescape 14 answers

I'm getting text from Internet and it contains html entities (i.e. ó = ó). I want to show this text into a custom iPhone cell.

I've tried to use a UIWebView into my custom cell but I prefer to use a multiline UILabel. The problem is I can't find any way of replacing these HTML entities.

Answer 1

Check out my NSString category for HTML. Here are the methods available:

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

Answer 2

Google Toolbox for Mac includes an iPhone-compatible NSString addition that will do this for you: gtm_stringByUnescapingFromHTML defined in GTMNSString+HTML.h and GTMNSString+HTML.m. If you comment out the calls to _GTMDevLog and #import "GTMDefines.h" in the .m you only need to add these two files to your project.

Answer 3

You can make a method that can replace html entities with strings given by you.

+(NSString*)parseString:(NSString*)str
{
    str  = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"–" withString:@"-"];
    str  = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"”" withString:@"\""];          
    str  = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"“" withString:@"\""];          
    str  = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"ó" withString:@"o"];          
    str  = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"'" withString:@"'"];                
    return str;
}

call this method to replace string by sending string as parameter.

Answer 4

To expand on Matt Stevens answer (since I'm not allowed to comment yet), you don't need to comment out _GTMDevLog, as it is intentionally set up so that you can #define it yourself to whatever you want.

Answer 5

Can you just use NSMutableString's replaceOccurrencesOfString:withString:options:range: method?