Rendering an ASCII art string with newline characters and backslashes - ios

Question

I am making an app where there is a requirement to store ASCII art into a database. I store the strings in the below format.
"___________\n |---------|-O\n/___________\\n|______________|\n\____________/"
When I retrieve the data and display it in a label, I want the newline characters and backslashes to be parsed so as to display the real shape of the ASCII art.
How should I parse this kind of strings?

Answer 1

NSString has a method to do what you want, which is to replace a litteral \n, with a newline character (which is symbolized as \n). In a c-format string you can use a double slash to let the library know the second slach is a real one and not an escape symbol. So this should work assuming you have been able to load your data from sqlite into an NSString:
newString = [yourStringFromSQLite stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:#"\\n" withString:#"\n"];

Answer 2

If you are using \n just for creating new lines then instead of that just keep space while inserting value in database and set following properties for label ->
1)keep width just to fit first word.
2)linebreakmode to wordwrap (so as width will not be available it will wrap next word to new line)
3)set no. of lines to 0
Hope this will help.

Answer 3

try to use the scanner for remove the html entities
- (NSString *)flattenHTML:(NSString *)html trimWhiteSpace:(BOOL)trim {
NSScanner *theScanner;
NSString *text = nil;
theScanner = [NSScanner scannerWithString:html];
while ([theScanner isAtEnd] == NO) {
[theScanner scanUpToString:#"<" intoString:NULL] ;
[theScanner scanUpToString:#">" intoString:&text] ;
html = [html stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:[ NSString stringWithFormat:#"%#>", text] withString:#" "];
}
return trim ? [html stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]] : html;
}
and call this method where your trimmed string need to display