iOS how to use complex labels in a button

[theprizerevealed]

I wonder how to add complex labels to a button. I know that you can do it in the default label in the Attributes Inspector but I wish to do it programmatically also.

By a complex label I mean newspaces, tabspaces, newlines, et cetera; along with the text of the label. I presume this is stored somewhere by the Attributes Inspector but I don't know where to find it.

In any case, I wish to store in a string text that would be on several lines, with tabspaces and newspaces. Can strings store information in that manner in Swift 3? thanks for your time and patience

postscript: is there any free program for mac that shows all carriage return, newlines, tablines, etc?

 

[AxoNeuron]

I would suggest using a normal UILabel, then add an invisible UIButton on top of it and use Auto Layout to make sure it's always on top.

 

[PhoneyDeveloper]

Pretty sure the standard UIButton only allows one line of text. You can add styled text to labels and other classes using NSAttributedString and setAttributedText. Maybe that would work for a button, never tried it. It gives a tremendous amount of control of the text appearance for labels and textViews.

I think when typing into the textboxes in IB you need to type tabs and newlines as escape codes: \t, \n, \r. But tabs don't have any meaning with setting the tab stops, which I think you can only do using NSAttributedString and a paragraph style.

You can view invisible characters in TextWrangler or BBEdit, which are free Mac text editors.

 

[grandM]

Pretty sure the standard UIButton only allows one line of text. You can add styled text to labels and other classes using NSAttributedString and setAttributedText. Maybe that would work for a button, never tried it. It gives a tremendous amount of control of the text appearance for labels and textViews.

I think when typing into the textboxes in IB you need to type tabs and newlines as escape codes: \t, \n, \r. But tabs don't have any meaning with setting the tab stops, which I think you can only do using NSAttributedString and a paragraph style.

You can view invisible characters in TextWrangler or BBEdit, which are free Mac text editors.

i also think attributed strings are the way to go
in the attributes inspector the op could select the attributed string option and try it out

 

[AxoNeuron]

Pretty sure that UIButtons don't allow for attributed strings.

You could create a custom UIButton subclass that automatically creates an invisible button in front of a normal UILabel. Then you can just set text attributes on the label. You can animate button presses too to make it look normal.

 

[KALLT]

You can set an attributed string as the title with the instance method setAttributedTitle(NSAttributedString?, for: UIControlState). I also don’t think UIButton supports multiple lines of text, however.

 

[PhoneyDeveloper]

The simplest solution may be a clear button on top of a label.

I wrote a UIButton subclass that adds a label as a subview so I can have two lines of text on the button. That would be another way to go.