Store and get UIColor from .plist file - objective-c

Question

I've been searching for this for a while now with no success. My question is: is there an easy way to store and get UIColors such as [UIColor blackColor] or [UIColor colorWithRed:0.38 green:0.757 blue:1 alpha:1]; in a .plist file in my app directory?

Answer 1

according to this discussion you have two options:
Store it like NSData in Data field of .plist file
Store it like String UIColor representation
NSData option
NSData *theData = [NSKeyedArchiver archivedDataWithRootObject:[UIColor greenColor]];
NSString option
NSString *color = #"greenColor";
[UIColor performSelector:NSSelectorFromString(color)]
read more here: http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-development/27335-setting-uicolor-plist.html

Answer 2

If you want to keep it human readabe,
I did a category for this:
#implementation UIColor (EPPZRepresenter)
NSString *NSStringFromUIColor(UIColor *color)
{
const CGFloat *components = CGColorGetComponents(color.CGColor);
return [NSString stringWithFormat:#"[%f, %f, %f, %f]",
components[0],
components[1],
components[2],
components[3]];
}
UIColor *UIColorFromNSString(NSString *string)
{
NSString *componentsString = [[string stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:#"[" withString:#""] stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:#"]" withString:#""];
NSArray *components = [componentsString componentsSeparatedByString:#", "];
return [UIColor colorWithRed:[(NSString*)components[0] floatValue]
green:[(NSString*)components[1] floatValue]
blue:[(NSString*)components[2] floatValue]
alpha:[(NSString*)components[3] floatValue]];
}
#end
The same formatting that is used by NSStringFromCGAffineTransform. This is actually a part of a bigger scale plist object representer in [eppz!kit at GitHub][1].

Answer 3

The best and readable way in Objective-c is to save it as hex string like: "#1A93A8", then to get it by extern method;
in .h file:
extern UIColor *colorFromHEX(NSString *hex);
extern NSString *HEXFromColor(UIColor *color);
in .m file:
UIColor *colorFromHEX(NSString *hex){
NSString *stringColor = hex;
int red, green, blue;
sscanf([stringColor UTF8String], "#%02X%02X%02X", &red, &green, &blue);
UIColor *color = [UIColor colorWithRed:red/255.0 green:green/255.0 blue:blue/255.0 alpha:1];
return color;
}
NSString *HEXFromColor(UIColor *color){
const CGFloat *components = CGColorGetComponents(color.CGColor);
size_t count = CGColorGetNumberOfComponents(color.CGColor);
if(count == 2){
return [NSString stringWithFormat:#"#%02lX%02lX%02lX",
lroundf(components[0] * 255.0),
lroundf(components[0] * 255.0),
lroundf(components[0] * 255.0)];
}else{
return [NSString stringWithFormat:#"#%02lX%02lX%02lX",
lroundf(components[0] * 255.0),
lroundf(components[1] * 255.0),
lroundf(components[2] * 255.0)];
}
}
in any where
NSDictionary *Config = [[NSDictionary alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:[NSBundle.mainBundle pathForResource:#"Config" ofType:#"plist"]];
UIColor *color = colorFromHEX( Config[#"color"] );
NSString *strColor = HEXFromColor( UIColor.blackColor );