Objective-C: How to replace HTML entities?

Question

I'm getting text from Internet and it contains html entities (i.e. ó = ó). I want to show this text into a custom iPhone cell.

I've tried to use a UIWebView into my custom cell but I prefer to use a multiline UILabel. The problem is I can't find any way of replacing these HTML entities.

you are not the first with this question. Take a look at this thread: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1105169/html-character-decoding-in-objective-c-cocoa — Shingoo, Mar 02 '10 at 17:11
I've read that question before, but this user is asking for numeric HTML entities which are easier to replace. The numeric code is the same and you just have to replace surrounding characters. — arielcamus, Mar 02 '10 at 17:49

Michael Waterfall · Accepted Answer · 2010-10-10T17:41:02.533

35

Check out my NSString category for HTML. Here are the methods available:

- (NSString *)stringByConvertingHTMLToPlainText;
- (NSString *)stringByDecodingHTMLEntities;
- (NSString *)stringByEncodingHTMLEntities;
- (NSString *)stringWithNewLinesAsBRs;
- (NSString *)stringByRemovingNewLinesAndWhitespace;

edited Oct 10 '10 at 17:41

answered May 16 '10 at 11:03

Michael Waterfall

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It seems this category is using Google Toolbox for Mac's category. – user1071136 Jun 04 '12 at 14:40
Yes it uses GTM for encoding/decoding HTML entities. – Michael Waterfall Jun 05 '12 at 10:10
What about [this](https://github.com/mwaterfall/MWFeedParser/issues/72) issue? – Praveenkumar May 16 '13 at 05:05
[Here](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/69670844/Nsstring%2BHTML.zip) is my files. – Praveenkumar May 16 '13 at 05:52
in iOS 6 (XCode 4.6), this library is not working :( – mohsin.mr Aug 05 '13 at 09:44
it's not nice, but if you change NSString *escapeSequence; to __unsafe_unretained NSString *escapeSequence; in GTMNSString+HTML.m and comment out everything from NSString+HTML.m that you don't need, then you'll be fine. – Zoltan Varadi Sep 16 '13 at 12:17

score 12 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 02 '10 at 21:41

12

Google Toolbox for Mac includes an iPhone-compatible NSString addition that will do this for you: gtm_stringByUnescapingFromHTML defined in GTMNSString+HTML.h and GTMNSString+HTML.m. If you comment out the calls to _GTMDevLog and #import "GTMDefines.h" in the .m you only need to add these two files to your project.

answered Mar 02 '10 at 21:41

Matt Stevens

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You don't need to comment out _GTMDevLog; you can #define it yourself to whatever you want. (Thanks to dmaclach, below.) – Reed Morse May 06 '13 at 22:52

score 6 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 21 '12 at 10:34

You can make a method that can replace html entities with strings given by you.

+(NSString*)parseString:(NSString*)str
{
    str  = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"&ndash;" withString:@"-"];
    str  = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"&rdquo;" withString:@"\""];          
    str  = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"&ldquo;" withString:@"\""];          
    str  = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"&oacute;" withString:@"o"];          
    str  = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"&#039;" withString:@"'"];                
    return str;
}

call this method to replace string by sending string as parameter.

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 21 '10 at 23:37

2

To expand on Matt Stevens answer (since I'm not allowed to comment yet), you don't need to comment out _GTMDevLog, as it is intentionally set up so that you can #define it yourself to whatever you want.

answered Mar 21 '10 at 23:37

dmaclach

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score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 02 '10 at 16:34

1

Can you just use NSMutableString's replaceOccurrencesOfString:withString:options:range: method?

answered Mar 02 '10 at 16:34

MarkPowell

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Using this message force me to define an array with all possible strings to replace which is a very heavy work. However, I'll try to find this array in other programming language and use it in Objective-C – arielcamus Mar 02 '10 at 16:49

Objective-C: How to replace HTML entities?

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