SwiftUI: Combining Text on the same line - ios

Question

the SwiftUI App I'm writing has large blocks of text, so I'm trying to create a "markup language" I can use in my JSON files that hold the text, to define when a word should be bolded. The issue is, I can't seem to stop new text blocks going to a different line.
Here is the relevant code as I currently have it.
struct formattedText: View {
var text: String
var body: some View {
let split = text.components(separatedBy: "**")
Group {
ForEach(split, id: \.self) { line in
if line.hasPrefix("$$") {
Text(line.trimmingCharacters(in: CharacterSet(charactersIn: "$")))
.bold()
} else {
Text(line)
}
}
}
.lineLimit(nil)
.multilineTextAlignment(.leading)
}
Using this code, I can put a **$$ before a word and ** after, to define it as bold.
Only issue is every time I bold a word it goes to a new line. I know the traditional way to fix this is:
Text("Simple ") + Text("Swift ") + Text("Guide")
This does not work with my ForEach loop though. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

ForEach creates separate Views. You really just want one Text, so you mean a for...in loop:
var body: some View {
let split = text.components(separatedBy: "**")
var result = Text("")
for line in split {
if line.hasPrefix("$$") {
result = result + Text(line.trimmingCharacters(in: CharacterSet(charactersIn: "$")))
.bold()
} else {
result = result + Text(line)
}
}
return result
.lineLimit(nil)
.multilineTextAlignment(.leading)
}
Since you may want a lot more things than just bold, you might find it useful to extract that part into its own function or collection of functions:
private func applyAttributes(line: String) -> Text {
if line.hasPrefix("$$") {
return Text(line.trimmingCharacters(in: CharacterSet(charactersIn: "$")))
.bold()
} else {
return Text(line)
}
}
With that, constructing this is simpler:
var body: some View {
text.components(separatedBy: "**")
.map(applyAttributes)
.reduce(Text(""), +)
.lineLimit(nil)
.multilineTextAlignment(.leading)
}