Adjust UILabel height depending on the text

Question

Consider I have the following text in a UILabel (a long line of dynamic text):

Since the alien army vastly outnumbers the team, players must use the post-apocalyptic world to their advantage, such as seeking cover behind dumpsters, pillars, cars, rubble, and other objects.

I want to resize the UILabel's height so that the text can fit in. I'm using following properties of UILabel to make the text within to wrap.

myUILabel.lineBreakMode = UILineBreakModeWordWrap;
myUILabel.numberOfLines = 0;

Please let me know if I'm not heading in the right direction. Thanks.

Answer 1

Problem is that none of mentioned functions is realiable and for some string and font will return incorrect height value. Especially will fail for attributed texts.

The only realiable solution is here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4214978/699944 and the point is to use CoreText to manually calculate height of every line to get right size. There is no other known way to do this.

Answer 2

Thanks guys for help, here is the code I tried which is working for me

   UILabel *instructions = [[UILabel alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(10, 225, 300, 180)];
   NSString *text = @"First take clear picture and then try to zoom in to fit the ";
   instructions.text = text;
   instructions.textAlignment = UITextAlignmentCenter;
   instructions.lineBreakMode = NSLineBreakByWordWrapping;
   [instructions setTextColor:[UIColor grayColor]];

   CGSize expectedLabelSize = [text sizeWithFont:instructions.font 
                                constrainedToSize:instructions.frame.size
                                    lineBreakMode:UILineBreakModeWordWrap];

    CGRect newFrame = instructions.frame;
    newFrame.size.height = expectedLabelSize.height;
    instructions.frame = newFrame;
    instructions.numberOfLines = 0;
    [instructions sizeToFit];
    [self addSubview:instructions];

Answer 3

And for those that are migrating to iOS 8, here is a class extension for Swift:

extension UILabel {

    func autoresize() {
        if let textNSString: NSString = self.text {
            let rect = textNSString.boundingRectWithSize(CGSizeMake(self.frame.size.width, CGFloat.max),
                options: NSStringDrawingOptions.UsesLineFragmentOrigin,
                attributes: [NSFontAttributeName: self.font],
                context: nil)
            self.frame = CGRectMake(self.frame.origin.x, self.frame.origin.y, self.frame.size.width, rect.height)
        }
    }

}

Answer 4

You can implement TableViewController's (UITableViewCell *)tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath method in the following way (for example) :

#define CELL_LABEL_TAG 1

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView  cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    NSString *text = @"my long text";

    static NSString *MyIdentifier = @"MyIdentifier";
    UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:MyIdentifier];
    if (cell == nil) {
        cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectZero  reuseIdentifier:identifier] autorelease];
    }

    CGFloat width = [UIScreen mainScreen].bounds.size.width - 50;
    CGFloat height = [self textHeight:text] + 10;
    CGRect frame = CGRectMake(10.0f, 10.0f, width, height);

    UILabel *cellLabel = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:frame];
    cellLabel.tag = CELL_LABEL_TAG;
    cellLabel.textColor = [UIColor blackColor];
    cellLabel.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
    cellLabel.textAlignment = UITextAlignmentLeft;
    cellLabel.font = [UIFont systemFontOfSize:12.0f];
    [cell.contentView addSubview:cellLabel];
    [cellLabel release];

    return cell;
}

UILabel *label = (UILabel *)[cell viewWithTag:CELL_LABEL_TAG];
label.text = text;
label.numberOfLines = 0;
[label sizeToFit];
return cell;

Also use NSString's sizeWithFont:constrainedToSize:lineBreakMode: method to compute the text's height.

Answer 5

-(UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    cellIdentifier = @"myCell";
    cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:cellIdentifier];
    cell.myUILabel.lineBreakMode = UILineBreakModeWordWrap;        
    cell.myUILabel.numberOfLines = 0;
    cell.myUILabel.text = @"Some very very very very long text....."
    [cell.myUILabel.criterionDescriptionLabel sizeToFit];    
}

- (CGFloat)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView heightForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    UITableViewCell *cell = [self tableView:tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:indexPath];
    CGFloat rowHeight = cell.myUILabel.frame.size.height + 10;

    return rowHeight;    
}

Answer 6

You were going in the right direction. All you need to do is:

myUILabel.numberOfLines = 0;
myUILabel.text = @"Enter large amount of text here";
[myUILabel sizeToFit];