ios - Copy NSAttributedString in UIPasteBoard

Question

How do you copy an NSAttributedString in the pasteboard, to allow the user to paste, or to paste programmatically (with - (void)paste:(id)sender, from UIResponderStandardEditActions protocol).

I tried:

UIPasteboard *pasteBoard = [UIPasteboard generalPasteboard];
[pasteBoard setValue:attributedString forPasteboardType:(NSString *)kUTTypeRTF];

but this crash with:

-[UIPasteboard setValue:forPasteboardType:]: value is not a valid property list type'

which is to be expected, because NSAttributedString is not a property list value.

If the user paste the content of the pasteboard in my app, I would like to keep all the standards and custom attributes of the attributed string.

Answer 1

I have found that when I (as a user of the application) copy rich text from a UITextView into the pasteboard, the pasteboard contains two types:

"public.text",
"Apple Web Archive pasteboard type

Based on that, I created a convenient category on UIPasteboard.
(With heavy use of code from this answer).

It works, but:
The conversion to html format means I will lose custom attributes. Any clean solution will be gladly accepted.

File UIPasteboard+AttributedString.h:

@interface UIPasteboard (AttributedString)

- (void) setAttributedString:(NSAttributedString *)attributedString;

@end

File UIPasteboard+AttributedString.m:

#import <MobileCoreServices/UTCoreTypes.h>

#import "UIPasteboard+AttributedString.h"

@implementation UIPasteboard (AttributedString)

- (void) setAttributedString:(NSAttributedString *)attributedString {
    NSString *htmlString = [attributedString htmlString]; // This uses DTCoreText category NSAttributedString+HTML - https://github.com/Cocoanetics/DTCoreText
    NSDictionary *resourceDictionary = @{ @"WebResourceData" : [htmlString dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding],
    @"WebResourceFrameName":  @"",
    @"WebResourceMIMEType" : @"text/html",
    @"WebResourceTextEncodingName" : @"UTF-8",
    @"WebResourceURL" : @"about:blank" };



    NSDictionary *htmlItem = @{ (NSString *)kUTTypeText : [attributedString string],
        @"Apple Web Archive pasteboard type" : @{ @"WebMainResource" : resourceDictionary } };

    [self setItems:@[ htmlItem ]];
}


@end

Only implemented setter. If you want to write the getter, and/or put it on GitHub, be my guest :)