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How to create static labels with a Text view

Paul Hudson @twostraws September 18th 2019

Fully updated for Xcode 11 GM

Text views show static text on the screen, and are equivalent to UILabel in UIKit. At their most basic they look like this:

Text("Hello World")

Inside the preview window for your content view you’re likely to see “Automatic preview updating paused” – go ahead and press Resume to have Swift start building your code and show you a live preview of how it looks.

By default text views wrap across as many lines as they need, but if you’d rather limit the number of lines they can use you should add the lineLimit modifier, like this:

Text("Hello World")
    .lineLimit(3)

Tip: Notice the way lineLimit(3) is placed below and to the right of Text("Hello World"). This is not required, but it does make your code easier to read in the long term.

If you place a line limit on some text then provide it with a string that’s too long to fit in the available space, SwiftUI will truncate the text so that it ends with “...”.

You can adjust the way SwiftUI truncates your text: the default is to remove text from the end and show an ellipsis there instead, but you can also place the ellipsis in the middle or beginning depending on how important the various parts of your string are.

For example, this truncates your text in the middle:

var body: some View {
    Text("This is an extremely long textbstring that will never fit even the widest of Phones")
        .lineLimit(1)
        .truncationMode(.middle)
}

Regardless of how you truncate the text, what you’ll see is that your text view sits neatly centered in the main view. This is the default behavior of SwiftUI – unless it’s told to position views somewhere else, it positions them relative to the center of the screen.

How to create static labels with a Text view

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