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What would be the best way to change this string:

"gain quickness for 5 seconds. <c=@reminder>(Cooldown: 90s)</c> only after"

into an Attributed String while getting rid of the part in the <> and I want to change the font of (Cooldown: 90s). I know how to change and make NSMutableAttributedStrings but I am stuck on how to locate and change just the (Cooldown: 90s) in this case. The text in between the <c=@reminder> & </c> will change so I need to use those to find what I need.

These seem to be indicators meant to be used for this purpose I just don't know ho.

Joshua Guenard
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  • You need to use `NSRegularExpression`. You can search a lot of examples in SO or google. – Ryan Aug 08 '18 at 21:14

1 Answers1

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First things first, you'll need a regular expression to find and replace all tagged strings.

Looking at the string, one possible regex could be <c=@([a-zA-Z-9]+)>([^<]*)</c>. Note that will will work only if the string between the tags doesn't contain the < character.

Now that we have the regex, we only need to apply it on the input string:

let str = "gain quickness for 5 seconds. <c=@reminder>(Cooldown: 90s)</c> only after"
let attrStr = NSMutableAttributedString(string: str)
let regex = try! NSRegularExpression(pattern: "<c=@([a-zA-Z-9]+)>([^<]*)</c>", options: [])
while let match = regex.matches(in: attrStr.string, options: [], range: NSRange(location: 0, length: attrStr.string.utf16.count)).first {
    let indicator = str[Range(match.range(at: 1), in: str)!]
    let substr = str[Range(match.range(at: 2), in: str)!]
    let replacement = NSMutableAttributedString(string: String(substr))
    // now based on the indicator variable you might want to apply some transformations in the `substr` attributed string
    attrStr.replaceCharacters(in: match.range, with: replacement)
}
Cristik
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  • hey this answer worked great thank you so much. I am having a problem though with when there are more than one matches because on the second time through the for loop the range of the string was changed and when it tries to replace the second match it says it's out of range. Any ideas to help with that? – Joshua Guenard Aug 28 '18 at 05:50
  • @JoshuaGuenard I fixed the issue, replaced the for loop on the original string to a while loop of the attributed string being worked on. – Cristik Aug 28 '18 at 07:13
  • is there a good reference for how to construct regex? Now there is another instance with a different pattern I'd like to extract. – Joshua Guenard Aug 28 '18 at 22:04