Cocoa: simple HTML text to Unicode

[Simon Slavin]

I have an NSString. 99% of the time it contains just text.
Sometimes one or more characters of the string will be encoded
in HTML, like the following:

Time for Questions & Answers.

What's the simplest method I can use to turn this into normal
text (I assume Unicode) ? There will never be any image or
link information in the string, just encoded text.

[Tom Harrington]

In article <BB8179049668744EF6@10.0.1.2>,
[email]slavins@hearsay.demon.co.uk[/email]@localhost (Simon Slavin) wrote:

> I have an NSString. 99% of the time it contains just text.
> Sometimes one or more characters of the string will be encoded
> in HTML, like the following:
>
> Time for Questions &amp; Answers.
>
> What's the simplest method I can use to turn this into normal
> text (I assume Unicode) ? There will never be any image or
> link information in the string, just encoded text.

One likely approach is as follows, though I have not tried it:

1. Load the NSString into an NSAttributedString, using
NSAttributedString's -initWithHTML:documentAttributes initializer.

2. Follow that by converting the attributed string back to an
un-attributed one.

--
Tom "Tom" Harrington
Macaroni, Automated System Maintenance for Mac OS X.
Version 1.4: Best cleanup yet, gets files other tools miss.
See [url]http://www.atomicbird.com/[/url]

[Paul Mitchum]

<slavins@hearsay.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> I have an NSString. 99% of the time it contains just text. Sometimes one
> or more characters of the string will be encoded in HTML, like the
> following:
>
> Time for Questions &amp; Answers.
>
> What's the simplest method I can use to turn this into normal text (I
> assume Unicode) ? There will never be any image or link information in
> the string, just encoded text.

Search the string for HTML-encoded character entities and then convert
them. :-) Numeric entities are assumed to be Unicode. Details:
<http://makeashorterlink.com/?M10E233D5>

Look at NSScanner, for some clues about how you might accomplish this.

[Doc O'Leary]

In article <BB8179049668744EF6@10.0.1.2>,
[email]slavins@hearsay.demon.co.uk[/email]@localhost (Simon Slavin) wrote:

> What's the simplest method I can use to turn this into normal
> text (I assume Unicode) ? There will never be any image or
> link information in the string, just encoded text.

My dirty little trick for this (used in STXML) was to note that Apple
provides a perfectly fine entity decoder for XML to handle property
lists, although they don't provide a detached interface to it. So I do
something like:

decodedString = [[NSString stringWithFormat: @"<string>%@</string>",
encodedString] propertyList];