Prevent UILabel from character wrapping symbols

Question

I have a multi-line label that has the following text:

Lots of text here · $$$$

Since the text at the beginning is freeform, sometimes the wrapping ends up looking like this:

Lots of text here · $$$
$

How do I prevent this from happening? I want it to look like this:

Lots of text here ·
$$$$

I've tried every lineBreakMode to little avail. Word wrap doesn't work because it doesn't treat $$$$ as a word.

Answer 1

It seems that you might benefit from subclassing UILabel, which would treat a string differently for the NSLineBreakByWordWrapping line break mode, which treats your phonetic words like words. You will effectively be expanding the definition by which your custom linebreakmode considers a word.

You would have to roll your own line-breaking algorithm. The approach to determining the location of your line-breaks would be similar to the following:

• Loop through the string, to get each character, until one of two conditions is met: a) you have reached the width of the view, or b) you have reached a space, and the next word (delimited by a space) doesn't fit on the same line.

• If you have reached condition a, you have two options--you could either adopt a policy that never splits words into multiple lines, or your could only apply the non-split rule to your phonetic words. Either way, you will need to insert a line break at the beginning of the phonetic word, when there is no more room on a given line.

• You may want to use two separate strings, to keep the source string separate from the display string that contains your formatting.

Let me know if that helps!

Answer 2

This might be very late but atleast it could help someone. The way I have done it is as follows:

UIFont *fontUsed = [UIFont systemFontOfSize:17];
NSDictionary *dictFont = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:fontUsed forKey:NSFontAttributeName];

NSString *strTextToShow = @"text that has to be displayed but without $$$$";
CGRect rectForSimpleText = [strTextToShow boundingRectWithSize:CGSizeMake(154, 258) options:NSStringDrawingUsesLineFragmentOrigin attributes:dictFont context:nil];

NSString *strTextAdded = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@ $$$$", strTextToShow];
CGFloat oldHeight = rectForSimpleText.size.height;

CGRect rectForAppendedText = [strTextAdded boundingRectWithSize:CGSizeMake(154, 258) options:NSStringDrawingUsesLineFragmentOrigin attributes:dictFont context:nil];
CGFloat newHeight = rectForAppendedText.size.height;

if (oldHeight < newHeight) {
    strTextAdded = [strTextAdded stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"$$$$" withString:@"\n$$$$"];
}

[lblLongText setText:strTextAdded];

lblLongText here is the IBOutlet of UILabel and CGSizeMake(154, 258) is the size of UILabel I have used. Let me know if there is any other way you have found.

Answer 3

Try inserting a line break in your input text.

Lots of text here ·\n $$$

It should print the $$$ in the next line.