Subscript and Superscripts in CDATA of an xml file. Using UILabel to display the parsed XML contents

Question

I need to display subscripts and superscripts (only arabic numerals) within a UILabel. The data is taken from an XML file. Here is the snippet of XML file:

<text><![CDATA[Hello World X\u00B2 World Hello]]></text>

Its supposed to display X2 (2 as superscript). When I read the string from the NSXMLParser and display it in the UILabel, it displays it as X\u00B2. Any ideas on how to make it work?

Answer 1

I think you can do something like this, assuming the CDATA contents have been read into an NSString and passed into this function:

-(NSString *)removeUnicodeEscapes:(NSString *)stringWithUnicodeEscapes {
    unichar codeValue;
    NSMutableString *result = [stringWithUnicodeEscapes mutableCopy];
    NSRange unicodeLocation = [result rangeOfString:@"\\u"];
    while (unicodeLocation.location != NSNotFound) {

        // Get the 4-character hex code
        NSRange charCodeRange = NSMakeRange(unicodeLocation.location + 2, 4);
        NSString *charCode = [result substringWithRange:charCodeRange];
        [[NSScanner scannerWithString:charCode] scanHexInt:&codeValue];

        // Convert it to an NSString and replace in original string
        NSString *unicodeChar = [NSString stringWithFormat:%C", codeValue];
        NSRange replacementRange = NSMakeRange(unicodeLocation.location, 6);
        [result replaceCharactersInRange:replacementRange withString:unicodeChar];

        unicodeLocation = [result rangeOfString:@"\\u"];
    }

    return result;
}

I haven't had a chance to try this out, but I think the basic approach would work