change corrupted html (&lt; )to correct one (<) [duplicate]

Question

Wondering if there is an easy way to do a simple HTML escape/unescape in Objective C. What I want is something like this psuedo code:

NSString *string = @"<span>Foo</span>";
[string stringByUnescapingHTML];

Which returns

<span>Foo</span>

Hopefully unescaping all other HTML entities as well and even ASCII codes like Ӓ and the like.

Is there any methods in Cocoa Touch/UIKit to do this?

Answer 1

Check out my NSString category for XMLEntities. There's methods to decode XML entities (including all HTML character references), encode XML entities, stripping tags and removing newlines and whitespace from a string:

- (NSString *)stringByStrippingTags;
- (NSString *)stringByDecodingXMLEntities; // Including all HTML character references
- (NSString *)stringByEncodingXMLEntities;
- (NSString *)stringWithNewLinesAsBRs;
- (NSString *)stringByRemovingNewLinesAndWhitespace;

Answer 2

Another HTML NSString category from Google Toolbox for Mac
Despite the name, this works on iOS too.

http://google-toolbox-for-mac.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Foundation/GTMNSString+HTML.h

/// Get a string where internal characters that are escaped for HTML are unescaped 
//
///  For example, '&' becomes '&'
///  Handles   and 2 cases as well
///
//  Returns:
//    Autoreleased NSString
//
- (NSString *)gtm_stringByUnescapingFromHTML;

And I had to include only three files in the project: header, implementation and GTMDefines.h.