cocoa - Transform an NSAttributedString to plain text

Question

I have an instance of NSData containing attributed text (NSAttributedString) originating from an NSTextView. I want to convert the attributed string to a plain string (NSString) without any formatting to do some text analysis (at the moment of conversion I do not have access to the originating NSTextView nor its NSTextStorage instance).

What would be the best way to do this?

EDIT:

Out of curiosity I examined the result of:

[[[self textView] textStorage] words]

which appeared to be a handy thing for doing some text analysis. The resulting array contains instances of NSSubTextStorage (example below of the word "Eastern"):

Eastern{ NSFont = ""LucidaGrande 11.00 pt. P [] (0x7ffcaae08330) fobj=0x10a8472d0, spc=3.48""; NSParagraphStyle = "Alignment 0, LineSpacing 0, ParagraphSpacing 0, ParagraphSpacingBefore 0, HeadIndent 0, TailIndent 0, FirstLineHeadIndent 0, LineHeight 0/0, LineHeightMultiple 0, LineBreakMode 0, Tabs ( 28L, 56L, 84L, 112L,
140L, 168L, 196L, 224L, 252L, 280L,
308L, 336L ), DefaultTabInterval 0, Blocks (null), Lists (null), BaseWritingDirection -1, HyphenationFactor 0, TighteningFactor 0.05, HeaderLevel 0"; }

NSSubTextStorage is probably a private class as I could not find any documentation for it. It also retains all formatting.

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly you have an NSData, say data, containing an encoded NSAttributedString. To reverse the process:

NSAttributedString *nas = [[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithData:data
                                                           options:nil
                                                documentAttributes:NULL
                                                             error:NULL];

and to get the plain text without attributes you then do:

NSString *str = [nas string];