Word Wrap Line Break not working in UILabel only for specific text Strings

Question

I have a UITableViewController with a custom prototype cell with three labels and one button. The middle label (called descriptionLabel ) is a multi-line label with Word Wrap as the "Line Breaks" option and 0 lines set in the Attributes inspector.

If I set the descriptionLabel.text property assigning a literal String , the Word Wrap option works fine, as shown in the following image:

Cell with Word Wrap working

The problem is that the descriptionLabel 's text comes from an object. This object is downloaded from a web service and is stored locally, and it's also used to fill all the others labels of the cell.

When I assign the object-property String to the descriptionLabel 's text ( cell.descriptionLabel.text = monthlyPaymentType.detail ), however, the Word Wrap is not working, as shown in the image below:

Cell with Word Wrap NOT working

In this case, "cobrado" is one word, but it is being character-wrapped instead of word-wrapped.

It's strange because If I copy the result of print(monthlyPaymentType.detail) , paste as a literal String and assign it to cell.descriptionLabel.text , the Word Wrap option also does not work.

But if I manually type a literal String with exactly the same content of print(monthlyPaymentType.detail) and assign it to cell.descriptionLabel.text , the Word Wrap option does work.

Am I doing anything wrong when configuring the Label? Is it any problem with the stored String in my object?

Answer 1

The problem is that the whitespaces in the Strings that come from the server and are stored in the objects are Unicode Non-Breaking Spaces (U+00A0). When these Strings are assigned to the UILabel text property, Non-Breaking Spaces are not considered as word separators.

To solve this problem, I replace the occurrences of U+00A0 characters with common Unicode whitespace (U+0020), using String 's method stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u{00A0}", withString: "\\u{0020}") .