UILabel text include multiple spaces at the end

Question

In Objective-C I have a UILabel that says 'Loading'. Every 0.5 seconds the string will gain another '.' until there are 3 dots, then it starts over. The problem I'm facing is that my string is centered and when each dot appears, the string jumps. The reason the string jumps is because the UILabel keeps trimming the right whitespace.

Here is an example of whats currently happening.

+------------+
|  Loading   |
+------------+
|  Loading.  |
+------------+
| Loading..  |
+------------+
| Loading... |
+------------+

And this is what I want to happen.

+------------+
| Loading    |
+------------+
| Loading.   |
+------------+
| Loading..  |
+------------+
| Loading... |
+------------+

Telling the UILabel to have a greater width and be left aligned is not an option. This needs to be done with the text.

I found this link, but I still cant figure it out.

What I currently have is this.

[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%-3.3s", [@"" UTF8String]];
[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%-3.3s", [@"." UTF8String]];
[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%-3.3s", [@".." UTF8String]];
@"...";

Answer 1

The way text works on label is - it is formatted by standard formatting information - like trimming etc. If you don't want ios to take control on that. You can programmatically set attributedText. this does not go thru formatting. Here is apple's documentation on that

attributedText The styled text displayed by the label.

@property(nonatomic,copy) NSAttributedString *attributedText Discussion This property is nil by default. Assigning a new value to this property also replaces the value of the text property with the same string data, albeit without any formatting information. In addition, assigning a new a value updates the values in the font, textColor, and other style-related properties so that they reflect the style information starting at location 0 in the attributed string.

Essentially set uilabel's attributedtext to "Loading "

Answer 2

take a look at this

the solution is add trailing visible charaters and set them transparent.