Copy NSAttributedString in UIPasteBoard

Question

How do you copy an NSAttributedString in the pasteboard, to allow the user to paste, or to paste programmatically (with - (void)paste:(id)sender

Answer 1

@Guillaume's approach using HTML doesn't work for me (at least in iOS 7.1 beta 5).

The cleaner solution is to insert NSAttributedStrings as RTF (plus plaintext fallback) into the paste board:

- (void)setAttributedString:(NSAttributedString *)attributedString {
    NSData *rtf = [attributedString dataFromRange:NSMakeRange(0, attributedString.length)
                               documentAttributes:@{NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute: NSRTFTextDocumentType}
                                            error:nil];
    self.items = @[@{(id)kUTTypeRTF: [[NSString alloc] initWithData:rtf encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding],
                     (id)kUTTypeUTF8PlainText: attributedString.string}];
}

Swift 2.3

public extension UIPasteboard {
  public func set(attributedString: NSAttributedString?) {

    guard let attributedString = attributedString else {
      return
    }

    do {
      let rtf = try attributedString.dataFromRange(NSMakeRange(0, attributedString.length), documentAttributes: [NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute: NSRTFTextDocumentType])
      items = [[kUTTypeRTF as String: NSString(data: rtf, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding)!, kUTTypeUTF8PlainText as String: attributedString.string]]

    } catch {

    }
  }
}

Swift 3

import MobileCoreServices
public extension UIPasteboard {
  public func set(attributedString: NSAttributedString?) {

    guard let attributedString = attributedString else {
      return
    }

    do {
      let rtf = try attributedString.data(from: NSMakeRange(0, attributedString.length), documentAttributes: [NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute: NSRTFTextDocumentType])
      items = [[kUTTypeRTF as String: NSString(data: rtf, encoding: String.Encoding.utf8.rawValue)!, kUTTypeUTF8PlainText as String: attributedString.string]]

    } catch {

    }
  }
}