This is an extremely common pattern I encounter quite a few times, and worthy of it’s own “things to remember” post.

So you want to have some text which wraps, but when it hits the bottom of the window, you get an ellipsis, right? But [NSString drawInRect…] doesn’t do the trick, right?

Well, it turns out the answer is using an NSAttributedString.

The first step is to turn your label string into an attributed string. At this point you need to know the font and color of the text that will be rendered, so you need to bake these attributes into the string. So, for example:

- (NSAttributedString *)attributedStringWithString:(NSString *)str
{
	UIFont *font = [UIFont boldSystemFontWithSize:19]; /* Some font */
	UIColor *color = [UIColor blackColor]; /* Some color */
	NSDictionary *dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
		font, NSFontAttributeName,
		color, NSForegroundColorAttributeName,
		nil];
	return [[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithString:str attributes:d];
}

The next step is to draw the string in the rectangle area where it belongs:

	NSAttributedString *astr = [self attributedStringWithString:self.myLabel];
	[astr drawWithRect:r
		options:NSStringDrawingUsesLineFragmentOrigin | NSStringDrawingTruncatesLastVisibleLine
		context:nil];

And this will wrap the text, truncating the last line with an ellipsis.

The advantage of using NSAttributedString is that you can also easily insert segments of text which are of a different color or style. I find it easiest to build up the attributed string through concatenation of attributed segments into an NSMutableAttributedString object. So, for example, if you’re displaying a tweet from Twitter and you wish to bold all the hashtags, you simply parse the string (scanning for sequences staring with whitespace and a ‘#’, and including all the alphanumeric characters past the ‘#’), and create an attributed string of that segment as bold, concatenating all the strings into a single mutable string.

And for optimization purposes you can then hang onto the attributed string rather than the original string.