Convert HTML to NSAttributedString in iOS

Question

I am using a instance of UIWebView to process some text and color it correctly, it gives the result as HTML but rather than displaying it in the UIWebView I want to display it using Core Text with a NSAttributedString.

I am able to create and draw the NSAttributedString but I am unsure how I can convert and map the HTML into the attributed string.

I understand that under Mac OS X NSAttributedString has a initWithHTML: method but this was a Mac only addition and is not available for iOS.

I also know that there is a similar question to this but it had no answers, I though I would try again and see whether anyone has created a way to do this and if so, if they could share it.

Answer 1

Made some modification on Andrew's solution and update the code to Swift 3:

This code now use UITextView as self and able to inherit its original font, font size and text color

Note: toHexString() is extension from here

extension UITextView {
    func setAttributedStringFromHTML(_ htmlCode: String, completionBlock: @escaping (NSAttributedString?) ->()) {
        let inputText = "\(htmlCode)<style>body { font-family: '\((self.font?.fontName)!)'; font-size:\((self.font?.pointSize)!)px; color: \((self.textColor)!.toHexString()); }</style>"

        guard let data = inputText.data(using: String.Encoding.utf16) else {
            print("Unable to decode data from html string: \(self)")
            return completionBlock(nil)
        }

        DispatchQueue.main.async {
            if let attributedString = try? NSAttributedString(data: data, options: [NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute: NSHTMLTextDocumentType], documentAttributes: nil) {
                self.attributedText = attributedString
                completionBlock(attributedString)
            } else {
                print("Unable to create attributed string from html string: \(self)")
                completionBlock(nil)
            }
        }
    }
}

Example usage:

mainTextView.setAttributedStringFromHTML("<i>Hello world!</i>") { _ in }