WSLHTMLEntities

Convert HTML Entities like › to their unicode equivalent.

Adding to your project

There are three ways of adding WSLHTMLEntities to your project:

• CocoaPods
• Adding the static library to your project as a dependency
• Adding the framework to your project as a dependency
• Drag-and-drop a few files manually

CocoaPods

Add the following line to your Podfile:

pod 'WSLHTMLEntities'

There is no step two.

Note that if you use the inhibit_all_warnings! directive the library will likely fail to build. This is because CocoaPods adds the same directives used for the Objective-C compilers whether or not it's building Objective-C code. This issue was closed nearly a year ago but still appears not to be fixed.

Library as a dependency

If you're using iOS 5 or above and are happy with ARC, it's as simple as:

1. Drag the WSLHTMLEntities.xcodeproj file to your project
2. Switch to the "Build Phases" project section
3. Add WSLHTMLEntities to "Target Dependencies"
4. Add libWSLHTMLEntities.a to "Link Binary With Libraries"

You can see an example in the same project. Another target, called "WSLHTMLEntities Sample," just shows you how to use the code.

There is a second target for the library called "WSLHTMLEntities (Fast)." This is, as the name suggests, a faster version. Unless performance is absolutely critical it's not worth the significantly larger binary that this option produces.

Framework as a dependency

If you're using iOS 8 or above, it's as simple as:

1. Drag the WSLHTMLEntities.xcodeproj file to your project
2. Switch to the "Build Phases" project section
3. Add WSLHTMLEntitiesFramework to "Target Dependencies"
4. Add WSLHTMLEntitiesFramework.framework to "Link Binary With Libraries"

You can see an example in the same project. Another target, called "WSLHTMLEntities Sample Framework," just shows you how to use the code.

Adding files manually

If you want to do it the hard, old way you just need to copy the following four files -- or at least references to them -- into your project:

• WSLHTMLEntities.h
• WSLHTMLEntities.m
• WSLHTMLEntities.lm
• WSLHTMLEntityDefinitions.h

The project works both with manual memory management and ARC.

Usage

There's only one method:

+(NSString*)convertHTMLtoString:(NSString*)html;

I'm sure you can figure out how to use it.

You can also use the instance method if you like:

WSLHTMLEntities* parser = [[WSLHTMLEntities alloc] init];
NSString* out = [parser convertHTMLtoString:in];

This may be slightly quicker if you're processing lots of strings.

WSLHTMLEntities is now thread-safe.

Maintenance

The lexer is based on HTML::Entities from CPAN (Perl). You can (mostly) generate the lexer and #define's with genEntitiesLexer.pl, but you would only need to do that it you want to add a new entity. Or there's a bug.

In the wild

It's used in the following apps:

• Yummy
• www.cut
• ShareEverywhere

Please let me know if you use it in yours.

Copyright

I'm not sure there's enough code from the Perl version to "taint" it but I don't have expensive lawyers like Google so I'm playing it safe and using the same licence -- the Artistic License. Basically you can do what you like with it but credits and push requests would be welcome.

Copyright 2012-2014 Stephen Darlington. Wandle Software Limited. All rights reserved.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.