I have an application (IM Client) that I wish to setup custom formatting symbols in similar to mIRC rather than relying on rich text. I will accomplish this by pairing a UniChar 003 with a number 0-15 to process colors and other characters for different things. The only problem that I have is that when these characters are inserted they are invisible so it is difficult for the end user to thus delete them when needed. Is there a way to manipulate NSTextField in a way to show squares for specific invisible characters?
You could replace them whith a visible character in the Text field, and when the user is done replace them back:
NSString *visibleFormatCharacters=[stringWithInvisibleCharacters stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:[NSString stringWithFormat:#"%c",0x03] withString:#"§"]];
when the user is done do it backwards:
NSString *invisibleFormatCharacters=[visibleFormatCharacters stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:#"§"] withString:[NSString stringWithFormat:#"%c",0x03]];
Related
I have the very basic line:
self.label.text = #",הם הכריחו אותה לשתות ויסקי";
Notice the comma at the left of the string. When this displays in a UILabel, I see the comma at the right. This is one example of punctuation problems I am seeing with Hebrew.
Any ideas for resolving this?
Most of the text you have is right-to-left, but a comma is left-to-right. You are displaying source code here as it is displayed by Xcode. It's not at all obvious what rules Xcode would choose to display such text. You would be much confident about what your source code is if you write
self.label.text = #"הם הכריחו אותה לשתות ויסקי" ",";
for example or
self.label.text = #"," "הם הכריחו אותה לשתות ויסקי";
so you know 100% sure what text you have in Xcode. After that I'm afraid it's very much a matter of reading the documentation and seeing what you need to do. While characters in text have some ordering, a text field on its own has a text ordering as well. You can have latin text with a bit of hebrew inside, or hebrew (right to left) text with a bit of latin inside, and they will behave differently.
What you describe looks like a left-to-right text field that is used to display some hebrew text, so the overall display order is left to right, but hebrew items inside (not the comma) are displayed right to left. You'd need to change the display order of the text field itself.
I've been reading up on Bi-directional text, it seems as though certain Unicode characters specify certain properties of the following text. Through experimentation, I've found that the Right-To-Left Isolate character, or U+2067 , will cause the text that follows to be displayed in the correct order. So the Objective C solution to the problem was:
self.label.text = [#"\u2067" stringByAppendingString: #",הם הכריחו אותה לשתות ויסקי"];
Coding in Objective-C, I'm appending text to a NSTextView object named subCap in my code like so:
[[[_subCAP textStorage] mutableString]appendString:[NSString stringWithFormat:#"%#", subcapLine]];
subcapLine will have two timecode values such as: "01:00:00:00 01:00:01:00" separated by a single space, then a newline (\n) character, then a string like "ONC314_001_001" followed by two newline chars (\n\n).
The end result will create a list similar to:
01:00:00:00 01:00:01:00
ONC314_001_001
01:00:01:00 01:00:02:00
ONC314_001_002
01:00:02:00 01:00:03:00
ONC314_001_003
etc, etc, etc.
It's a sub caption file for placing text (the ONC314 lines) at appropriate times in a video file, as indicated by the timecodes.
However, I've determined that there is an odd set of circumstances where a timecode pair could be the same as the previous timecode pair, and if that happens, I want to skip appending that line.
So, my question is, given that the timecodes are always 11 chars apiece, separated by a space, can anybody think of a way I can easily grab the prior TC pair and compare it to my current pair in the subcapLine I'm preparing to append? The problem is the text of the sub caption could be random lengths. In my example they're the same, but that isn't always the case.
If I need to check prior to compiling my subcapLine, I can do that too, but I just thought it might be more slick to use a range of some sort to grab the prior pair of TCs from the last-written line in the NSTextView object and compare (again, using a range?) against the TCs in the line I'm about to append?
Thoughts and suggestions much appreciated.
Chris Conlee
When you add a timecode store the length of the text field string just before you add the timecode so you will have the offset to the timecode you are about to add.
Then before adding a new timecode you could simply use the previous offset you stored to extract the substring and do a string comparison and see if the timecodes are identical.
This should allow you to always have an offset to the previous timecode regardless of the length of the subtitles.
I have a UITextField and I need to check, as the user types, if the text they have entered in the textfield so far matches a specific pattern.
More specifically, I need the text to match the pattern ####-##-## where # is any digit 0-9 and - is a dash (note that this is NOT a phone number or email). For example, the entry 1990-12-09 matches, 1990:12:09 does not match and 1990-12 DOES match because it has not yet violated the pattern (even though the text does not yet completely match the pattern).
How should I approach this? Ideally I would not have to hard code in a series of if statements .
The difficulty is that I want to check if the text in the textfield matches this pattern, as the user types. I don't want to just check it at the end.
I'm thinking that regular expressions are probably the way, but I'm not experienced enough at them to know if they hold the solution.
You could set the keyboard type to myTextField.keyboardType = UIKeyboardTypeNumberPad that why you are limiting the type of input.
Then this post should help answer your formatting question: UITextField format in xx-xx-xxx
I'm working on a translator that will take English language text (as user input into a UITextView) and (with a button press) replace specific words with alternatives. I have both the English words in scope plus their alternatives in separate Arrays (englishArray and alternativeArray), indexed correspondingly.
My challenge is finding an algorithm that will allow me to identify a word in the input text (a UITextView) ignoring characters like <",.()>, lookup the word in englishArray (case insensitive), locate the corresponding word in alternativeArray and then use that word in place of the original - writing it back to the UITextView.
Any help greatly appreciated.
NB. I have created a Category extending the NSArray functionality with a indexOfCaseInsensitiveString method that ignores case when doing an indexOfObject type lookup if that helps.
Tony.
I think that using an NSScanner would be best to parse the string into separate words which you could then pass to your indexOfCaseInsensitiveString method. scanCharactersFromSet:intoString: using a set of all the characters you want to ignore, including whitespace and newline characters should get you to the start of a word, and then you could use scanUpToCharactersFromSet:intoString: using the same set to scan to the end of the word. Using scanLocation at the beginning and end of each scan should allow you to get the range of that word, so if you find a match in your array, you will know where in your string to make the replacement.
Thanks for your suggestion. It's working with one exception.
I want to capture all punctuation so I can recreate the original input but with the substituted words. Even though I have a 'space' in my Character Set, the scanner is not putting the spaces into the 'intoString'. Other characters I specify in the Character Set such as '(' and ';' are represented in the 'intoString'.
Net is that when I recreate the input, it's perfect except that I get individual words running into each other.
UPDATE: I fixed that issue by including:
[theScanner setCharactersToBeSkipped:nil];
Thanks again.
I have an instance of NSTextField, e.g. someTextField, for which I will use the number formatter to limit the input to numbers only.
The problem comes with the localization combined with the specific keyboard layouts used.
I would like to allow both the, say, American and European users to enter their localized decimal separators. As you all know, in the USA that would be . and for the good part of Europe that would be , (and similar with the thousands separator, etc. but let's put that to the side for now).
So I wrote the following task:
[numberFormatter setLocale:[NSLocale currentLocale]]; for the instance of the NSNumberFormatter.
Problems occurs when the user who has , set as a decimal separator AND US keyboard layout switched on (fairly common here in Europe) presses the decimal separator key on the numeric keyboard. With the US keyboard layout on, that would give him the . as the decimal separator but at the same time it'll be ignored in the someTextField because of the localized settings system-wide. So, if you want to type 1/2 using numeric keyboard only, you'll type 0.5 (US keyboard layout) in the text field and it would be read by the system as 0 because it recognizes only , as decimal separator. This is how the program currently is working and I would like to improve it in this regard.
I would like to allow user to type in the . in the someTextField and for the system to recognize it as a decimal separator just like it would ,. This kind of behavior can be seen in Apple's own Calculator application. If you type . on the numeric keyboard it'll appear as , immediately on the screen (for all conditions as described previously).
Question is: is it possible for me to achieve this using an instance of NSNumberFormatter? If not, is it possible to set on-the-fly conversion of the numerical keyboard decimal separator key output to the decimal separator set system-wide? Or perhaps you have some other suggestions?
Thanks.
I don't have a specific answer to your question, but I'd say the right approach is not to muck about with the NSNumberFormatter at all and concentrate on trying to change the characters generated by the keyboard.
The default locale for number formatters is usually the system's default locale as set by the user in the internationalization settings. If you change that behaviour programmatically for UI elements, you are effectively telling the user "I know better than you how you want to input numbers". Arrogance of that sort on the part of the developer never gets them good marks with respect to UI design.
In fact, you could apply the same argument to remapping the dot button on the numeric keypad. How do you know that the user hasn't set US keyboard layout because it allows them to get a dot from that key? Maybe they consider it more important to be able to type the thousands separator from the keypad than the decimal separator. I'm not saying you shouldn't implement your feature, just make sure that the user has control over when it is enabled or disabled.
Anyway, you probably want to override the keyDown event on the control. More info here.
Take a look at the UITextFieldDelegate protocol. It allows your textfield to ask its delegate if it should accept a character which the user just typed. The apropriate method would be textField:shouldChangeCharactersInRange:replacementString. If the character in question is , or . just let the delegate append the properly localized decimal separator "manually" and return NO.
I'm not quite sure if this will work if the text field is set to number mode, maybe the input is being filtered before the delegate method is called - leading to the method not being called if the "wrong" separator has been filtered out previously. If so, you might want to consider leaving the text field in alphanumerical mode and use the delegate method again to filter out anything that is not numbers or separators. However, in this case you should make sure the user is not allowed to type more then one decimal separator - either ignore the surplus ones or remove the first one and accept the new one.