A simple to use drop in replacement for UILabel written in Swift that provides automatic detection of links such as URLs, twitter style usernames and hashtags.

ContextLabel doesn't have any special dependencies so just include the files ContextLabel.swift from ContextLabel/Source in your project. Then use the ContextLabel class in replacement for UILabel.

ContextLabel supports different colors for URLs, twitter style usernames and hashtags. By default the link text colors are set to userHandle RGB(71,90,109), hashtag RGB(151, 154, 158) and url RGB(45, 113, 178). If there is no UIColor set on the highlighted textColor properties, an alpha of 0.5 is applied to the set text color when a link is detected.

To set your own text colors you can use the convenience initializer init(with userHandleTextColor: UIColor, hashtagTextColor: UIColor, linkTextColor: UIColor)

In order to get the selected string as well as Range you need to adopt the ContextLabelDelegate protocol and implement the func contextLabel(contextLabel: ContextLabel, didSelectText: String, inRange: NSRange)

let contextLabel = ContextLabel(frame: CGRectMake(0, 0, 320, 100))
contextLabel.text = "ContextLabel is a Swift drop-in replacement for UILabel that supports selectable @UserHandle, #Hashtags and links https://github.com/michaelloistl/ContextLabel"
contextLabel.delegate = self

view.addSubview(contextLabel)

When setting the text, ContextLabel generates an instance of ContextLabelData which is a NSObject subclass that can be persisted in order to enable reuse for unchanged data.

ContextLabelData holds the actual attributedString, the linkRangeResults and a userInfo dictionary which can be used to compare against the model data to see if it’s still valid.

if let cachedContextLabelData: ContextLabelData = … {
	// Set cached contextLabelData
	contextLabel.contextLabelData = cachedTextContextLabelData
} else {
	// Set label text
	contextLabel.text = text

	// Cache contextLabelData that has been generated from contextLabel
	cacheContextLabelData(contextLabel.contextLabelData)
}          

The Repository includes a Xcode project that shows a simple use of the label in a ViewController with selectable @UserHandle, #Hashtag and link.

ContextLabel is available under the MIT license.

KILabel was inspired by KILabel (https://github.com/Krelborn/KILabel).

• http://michaelloistl.com
• http://twitter.com/michaelloistl
• http://github.com/michaelloistl