What is the equivalent of Android's "Spannable" in Objective-C

Question

Im on an iOS app that should able to highlight text, and make it clickable too.

I read about NSAttributedString in iOS but it still more complicated than Spannable in android.

Is there any other Objective c way to do that, if not; what should i do using NSAttributedString to highlight a paragraph word by word, and how to make my text clickable.

Update:

What exactly i want that each word should be clickable and can be highlighted as a single word in one paragraph.

Answer 1

I found a perfect solution using UITextView, it will make every word in within the UITextView clickable.

Firstly, Create an UITextView and add an UITapGestureRecognizer to it as follows:

CGRect textViewFrame = CGRectMake(0, 40, 100, 100);
textView = [[UITextView alloc]initWithFrame: textViewFrame];
textView.textAlignment = NSTextAlignmentCenter;
textView.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
textView.editable = NO;
textView.selectable = NO;

[self.view addSubView:textView];

// i used to `NSMutableAttributedString` highlight the text

 string = [[NSMutableAttributedString alloc]initWithString:@"Any text to detect A B $ & - +"];
    [string addAttribute:NSFontAttributeName
                  value:[UIFont systemFontOfSize:40.0]
                  range:NSMakeRange(0, [string length])];
    NSMutableParagraphStyle *paragraphStyle = [[NSMutableParagraphStyle alloc]init] ;
    [paragraphStyle setAlignment:NSTextAlignmentCenter];

    [string addAttribute:NSParagraphStyleAttributeName value:paragraphStyle range:NSMakeRange(0, [string length])];

    [textView setAttributedText:string];

UITapGestureRecognizer *singleTap = [[UITapGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithTarget:self action:@selector(tapRecognized:)];

//modify this number to recognizer number of tap
[singleTap setNumberOfTapsRequired:1];
[textView addGestureRecognizer:singleTap];

Then add the UITapGestureRecognizer @selector:

- (void)tapRecognized:(UITapGestureRecognizer *)recognizer{

    if(recognizer.state == UIGestureRecognizerStateRecognized)
    {

        CGPoint point = [recognizer locationInView:recognizer.view];
        NSString * detectedText = [self getWordAtPosition:point inTextView: textView];

        if (![detectedText isEqualToString:@""]) {

    NSLog(@"detectedText  == %@", detectedText);


        } }

}

All this magic is related to this method, witch can detect any touch on the UITextView and get the tapped word:

-(NSString*)getWordAtPosition:(CGPoint)pos inTextView:(UITextView*)_tv
{
    //eliminate scroll offset
    pos.y += _tv.contentOffset.y;

    //get location in text from textposition at point
    UITextPosition *tapPos = [_tv closestPositionToPoint:pos];

    //fetch the word at this position (or nil, if not available)
    UITextRange * wr = [_tv.tokenizer rangeEnclosingPosition:tapPos withGranularity:UITextGranularityWord inDirection:UITextLayoutDirectionRight];

    return [_tv textInRange:wr];
}

And for highlighting the text:

-(void)setTextHighlited :(NSString *)txt{

    for (NSString *word in [textView.attributedText componentsSeparatedByString:@" "]) {

        if ([word hasPrefix:txt]) {
            NSRange range=[self.textLabel.text rangeOfString:word];
            [string addAttribute:NSForegroundColorAttributeName value:[UIColor blueColor] range:range];
         }}
    [textView setAttributedText:string];

}

And thats it, hope this helps others.