Convert Markdown-formatted string to NSAttributedString in Swift

Question

Is there a way to convert a plain text string containing Markdown text (i.e., # heading, * list item, [a link](http://example.com), etc.) to an NSAttributedString in Swift? I suppose I could perform some kind of regex search for the indices of certain MD patterns and create the attributed string from that, but that seems clunky and feels wrong to me.

Is there an easier method?

Answer 1

You can try using a third party library like Down. It's a lot simpler than creating your own parsing engine.

After installing this library, you can use the following code to parse markdown strings to NSAttributedStrings:

let downMdStr = Down(markdownString: yourMarkdownString)
let attributedStr = try? down.toAttributedString()

attributedStr is an NSAttributedString. However, it may be nil if any error occurs, so remember to perform checking.

Answer 2

iOS 15 now supports Markdown parsing directly by NSAttributedString/AttributedString class.

let markdownString = "..."
let attrString = try AttributedString(markdown: markdownString)

See details here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/attributedstring