cocoatoucher / xmltext

Generate styled SwiftUI Text from strings with XML tags.

XMLText is a mini library that can generate SwiftUI Text from a given XML string with tags. It uses AttributedString to compose the final text output.

Text(
    xmlString: "my <bold>localized</bold> and <italic>styled</italic> string",
    styleGroup: myStyleDefinitions
)

The original idea comes directly from SwiftRichString library by Daniele Margutti on GitHub. Code for XML parsing, StyleProtocol, and StyleGroup are taken from this library, slight modifications are made to them in order to generate SwiftUI Text instead of NSAttributedString.

This is really useful for localising your apps for styled strings without having to know the location of the strings in the code that needs to be styled. This is a pretty fine alternative to having to use NSAttributedString with UIViewRepresentable of a UILabel in a SwiftUI app, as the layout of UIViewRepresentable for such dynamic views as UILabel doesn't always work and is prone to glitches when combined with other SwiftUI views.

Examples

iOS 15.0 / macOS 12.0 / tvOS 15.0 / watchOS 8.0

Supported Text modifiers

font(SwiftUI.Font)

foregroundColor(Color)

strikethrough(Color)

underline(Color)

kerning(CGFloat)

tracking(CGFloat)

baselineOffset(CGFloat)

Sample usage

This is an example of XML strings that would appear in your Localizable.strings files with words in different order for each different language, namely English and Swedish for this example. If you are not familiar with that approach, please note that the style information(StyleGroup keys, e.g. <italicStyle>) is also contained in the localized strings.

// This goes to English Localizable.strings
let englishXML = "%1$@ <italicStyle>%2$@</italicStyle>"

// This goes to Swedish Localizable.strings
let swedishXML = "<italicStyle>%2$@</italicStyle> %1$@"

let normalStyle = Style { style in
	style.font = .subheadline
	style.foregroundColor = .red
}

let italicStyle = Style { style in
	style.font = Font.italic(.system(size: 20))()
	style.foregroundColor = .blue
}

let styleGroup = StyleGroup(
	base: normalStyle,
	["italicStyle": italicStyle]
)

Text(
	xmlString: String(format: englishXML, "Director", "Martin"),
	styleGroup: styleGroup
)
Text(
	xmlString: String(format: swedishXML, "Regissör", "Martin"),
	styleGroup: styleGroup
)

🔗 Links

You can add links inside your strings via: <a href="http://www.example.com">This is a link</a>

🎆 Images (not supported)

It is currently not supported to include Image elements within AttributedString.

Custom XML Attributes (not supported)

For example: <italicStyle myAttribute="something"></italicStyle>

This is currently not supported for sake of simplicity and given the fact that the library doesn't have so many capabilities for that to make sense. If there would be some use cases regarding this, a similar approach to XMLDynamicAttributesResolver of SwiftRichString library could be considered in the future.