ios: best way to display variable-length, multi-line text

Question

I'm planning on loading multi-paragraph content from a text file and displaying it on the UI. I'll be loading from one of several text files and won't know ahead of time how long the text is going to be. My first thought was to use a UILabel inside a UIScrollView. However, it doesn't seem like UILabel can be made to expand based on the number of lines it contains. Is this correct?

If UILabel isn't the right tool for the job, what should I use? UIWebView? Will UIWebView handle the scrolling nicely for me?

score 20 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 21 '11 at 17:28

20

Check out UITextView. You can place one inside a UIView, and the text view provides all the functionality of a scroll view, and more (it is a UIScrollView subsclas).

answered Apr 21 '11 at 17:28

Mark Granoff

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Thanks. On first glance it looked as if UITextView was always editable. I'll take a look and see if it has a readonly option. – morgancodes Apr 21 '11 at 17:34
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Yep, it does. I believe it is the `editable` property. Set it to `NO`. – Mark Granoff Apr 21 '11 at 17:46
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Also set `selectable` to `NO` if you don't want the user to be able to copy/paste it. – Arnaud Mar 20 '14 at 14:10

score 14 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 21 '11 at 17:32

If you don't want to use a UITextView, which is scrollable so will accommodate whatever text you need, you can check out some methods to compute the size of a UILabel, for example, on the fly.

This should get you started in the right direction: NSString has a few UIKit category methods

- (CGSize)sizeWithFont:(UIFont *)font constrainedToSize:(CGSize)size;
- (CGSize)sizeWithFont:(UIFont *)font constrainedToSize:(CGSize)size lineBreakMode:(UILineBreakMode)lineBreakMode;

You call these methods on an NSString, passing in whatever font you want used as well as the maximum size. Usually, I will constrain the width but give a very large height so it can let me know what the best height is. These methods will return a CGSize that you can then use to set the frames of the UILabels. For example, if I know the maximum width that I can place the label in is 300 points wide, I will pass a CGSizeMake(300, 2000) for the constrained size.

ios: best way to display variable-length, multi-line text

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