How to convert HTML to an NSAttributedString

Swift version: 5.6

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

You can create an NSAttributedString directly from HTML, including support for a wide range of formatting, using a special initializer and passing in NSAttributedString.DocumentType.html for your document type.

For example, given the following HTML:

let html = """
<html>
<body>
<h1>Hello, world!</h1>
</body>
</html>
"""

You first need to convert that string into a Data instance, like this:

let data = Data(html.utf8)

You can now create an NSAttributedString from that. This is a throwing call because you might try to convert something that isn’t valid, so we’re going to use try? and wrap it in if let:

if let attributedString = try? NSAttributedString(data: data, options: [.documentType: NSAttributedString.DocumentType.html], documentAttributes: nil) {
    yourLabel.attributedText = attributedString
}