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Comment by lazerwalker | Hacker News Reader

"there must be an iOS equivalent of the <strong> tag, right? Apparently not."

It's not a silver bullet (it can sometimes give you a bit of a performance hit), but the Nimbus library has a UILabel subclass that makes bolding a substring a lot less painful than manual NSAttributedString munging: http://docs.nimbuskit.info/group___nimbus_attributed_label.h...

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Agreed. I actually wrapped this library with a simple HTML parser that can understand basic tags (<strong>, <b>, <a>, etc.) and translate them into calls to Nimbus.

At some point, I'd love to incorporate a Fireball markdown parser so that authored and styled content from our servers can just be pulled from our app.

You might be interested in something I plan to open source at some point: a native Markdown lexing / parsing engine meant to be used to stylize markdown for Core Text / NSAttributedString.

Here's the meat of it in a gist: https://gist.github.com/29dabe4b6e762ee221df

Thanks a lot for the link, I was going to write Markdown -> NSAttributedString library myself, because I couldn't find one. Right now I'm just using DTCoreText and convert Markdown to HTML on the server.

You might also want to look into GitHub's Sundown library. It's an awesome library and being written in pure C, you can use it natively.

The reason I wrote myself is that my use case was more markdown highlighting than markdown parsing. I needed to preserve the markdown source untouched, which Sundown doesn't support.

https://github.com/vmg/sundown

The typical solution where I work is, if I recall correctly, a TTTAttributedLabel: https://github.com/mattt/TTTAttributedLabel

I found NIAttributedLabel to work quite nicely for this and it's pretty straightforward.

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