Setting up

After a long project 23, it’s time to ease off and look at something that you might think would be much easier: strings. Yes, those pieces of text we take for granted in almost every program we write – they ought to be fairly straightforward things, but it turns out that they are complicated little beasts and take a little thinking.

In this technique project we’re going to look at why strings often confuse newcomers to Swift, we’ll try out a variety of properties and methods that are useful, and we’re also going to look at how to add formatting to strings – bold, italics, color, and more – using a separate class called NSAttributedString. Supported for attributed strings is baked into most of UIKit, so you can use it with UILabel, UITextView, and more.

In Xcode, go to the File menu and choose New > Playground. Name it Project24, make sure iOS is selected as the platform, then choose Next and save it somewhere you can find later.

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