Swift How to Add Background Color Just Around Text in a Label

Swift how to add background color just around text in a label?

You can use a regex to find anything but white spaces, use a while loop to find its occurrences in a string and use those ranges to change the background color of an attributed string:

Swift 4

let mutable = NSMutableAttributedString(string: interests)
var startIndex = interests.startIndex
while let range = interests.range(of: "\\S+", options: .regularExpression, range: startIndex..<interests.endIndex) {
    mutable.addAttribute(.backgroundColor, value: UIColor.cyan, range: NSRange(range, in: interests))
    startIndex = range.upperBound
}
label.attributedText = mutable

Note: If you would like to add space around your text you can change your regex to " \\S+ " and don't forget to add spaces at the begin and at the end of your original interests string.

Add highlight/background to only text using Swift

As far as I have tried its not possible to get what you want simply with attributed text because using:

let attributedText = NSMutableAttributedString(string: "Evangelizing Desing Thinking",
    attributes: [
        .font: UIFont.systemFont(ofSize: 14),
        .backgroundColor: UIColor.gray
    ]
)

Will add extray gray background at the end of each line. My previous answer was not good neither because it only adds a gray background on each word, not on spaces, and as @Alladinian noticed, ranges can be wrong in some cases.

So here is a hack you can use to achieve what you want. It uses multiple labels but it can be easily improved by putting labels in a custom view. So, in your viewDidLoad / CustomView function add:

    // Maximum desired width for your text
    let maxLabelWidth: CGFloat = 80
    // Font you used
    let font = UIFont.systemFont(ofSize: 14)
    // Your text
    let text = "Eva ngel izing Des ing a Thin king"
    // Width of a space character
    let spaceWidth = NSString(string: " ").size(withAttributes: [NSAttributedString.Key.font: font]).width

    // Width of a row
    var currentRowWidth: CGFloat = 0
    // Content of a row
    var currentRow = ""
    // Previous label added (we keep it to add constraint betweeen labels)
    var prevLabel: UILabel?

    let subStrings = text.split(separator: " ")
    for subString in subStrings {
        let currentWord = String(subString)
        let nsCurrentWord = NSString(string: currentWord)
        // Width of the new word
        let currentWordWidth = nsCurrentWord.size(withAttributes: [NSAttributedString.Key.font: font]).width
        // Width of the row if you add a new word
        let currentWidth = currentRow.count == 0 ? currentWordWidth : currentWordWidth + spaceWidth + currentRowWidth

        if currentWidth <= maxLabelWidth { // The word can be added in the current row
            currentRowWidth = currentWidth
            currentRow += currentRow.count == 0 ? currentWord : " " + currentWord
        } else { // Its not possible to add a new word in the current row, we create a label with the current row content
            prevLabel = generateLabel(with: currentRow,
                                      font: font,
                                      prevLabel: prevLabel)
            currentRowWidth = currentWordWidth
            currentRow = currentWord
        }
    }

    // Dont forget to add the last row
    generateLabel(with: currentRow,
                  font: font,
                  prevLabel: prevLabel)

Then you have to create the generateLabel function:

@discardableResult func generateLabel(with text: String,
                                      font: UIFont,
                                      prevLabel: UILabel?) -> UILabel {
    let leftPadding: CGFloat = 50 // Left padding of the label
    let topPadding: CGFloat = 100 // Top padding of (first) label

    let label = UILabel()
    label.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false
    self.view.addSubview(label)
    label.leftAnchor.constraint(equalTo: self.view.leftAnchor, constant: leftPadding).isActive = true
    if let prevLabel = prevLabel {
        label.topAnchor.constraint(equalTo: prevLabel.bottomAnchor).isActive = true
    } else {
        label.topAnchor.constraint(equalTo: self.view.topAnchor, constant: topPadding).isActive = true
    }
    label.font = font
    label.text = text
    label.backgroundColor = .gray

    return label
}

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Previous answer:

As Yogesh suggested, you can use attributed string:

    // Init label
    let label = UILabel(frame: CGRect(x: 50, y: 50, width: 90, height: 120))
    self.view.addSubview(label)
    label.lineBreakMode = .byTruncatingTail
    label.numberOfLines = 0
    label.backgroundColor = .white

    // Create attributed text
    let text = "Evangelizing Desing Thinking"
    let attributedText = NSMutableAttributedString(string: text,
        attributes: [
            .font: UIFont.systemFont(ofSize: 14)
        ]
    )

    // Find ranges of each word
    let subStrings = text.split(separator: " ")
    let ranges = subStrings.map { (subString) -> Range<String.Index> in
        guard let range = text.range(of: subString) else {
            fatalError("something wrong with substring") // This case should not happen
        }
        return range
    }

    // Apply background color for each word
    ranges.forEach { (range) in
        let nsRange = NSRange(range, in: text)
        attributedText.addAttribute(.backgroundColor, value: UIColor.gray, range: nsRange)
    }

    // Finally set attributed text
    label.attributedText = attributedText

How to change the background color of a UILabel with swift

Updated for swift 3:

1] if you want to change the UILabel background color, then used below simple lines of code:

yourLabelName.backgroundColor = UIColor.green

Note:- You can also be used different types of standard colors, UIColor.white, UIColor.red...

2] If you want to change the UILabel text color, then used below simple lines of code:

   yourLabelName.textColor = UIColor.red

// Enjoy Coding...!

Swift change label text background color according to plist file

Upvoting the other answer because I didn't notice that you're not doing a comparison in your if's. But also wanted to add that you might want to consider a switch statement here instead of a series of if/else statements. For example your viewDidLoad could be written as:

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()

    if let card = card {
        navigationItem.title = card.name?.capitalizedString
        imageView.image = UIImage(named: card.name!.lowercaseString)
        titleLabel.text = card.title?.capitalizedString

        //Mode label
        modeLabel.text = card.mode?.capitalizedString

        // Color the text backgrounds and then resize them later for the cards
        //Red

        switch card.color ?? "none" {   // default to none
            case "0":    titleLabel.backgroundColor = UIColor.greenColor()
            case "1":    titleLabel.backgroundColor = UIColor.greenColor()
            case "2":    titleLabel.backgroundColor = UIColor.yellowColor()
            case "3":    titleLabel.backgroundColor = UIColor.blueColor()
            case "4":    titleLabel.backgroundColor = UIColor(red: 238.0, green: 204, blue: 204.0, alpha: 1.0)
            case "5":    titleLabel.backgroundColor = UIColor(red: 238.0, green: 204.0, blue: 204.0, alpha: 1.0)
            case "6":    titleLabel.backgroundColor = UIColor(red: 104.0, green: 88.0, blue: 139.0, alpha: 1.0)
            default:     titleLabel.hidden = false
        }

        // Label style
        // self.titleLabelStyle()

    }
}

Change background and label colour of UICollectionView cell when it is selected

Just change in your cell

override var isSelected: Bool{
    willSet{
        super.isSelected = newValue
        self.layer.borderColor = newValue ?  UIColor.black.cgColor : #colorLiteral(red: 0.6862131953, green: 0.686313808, blue: 0.6861912012, alpha: 1)
        self.lblSubItem.textColor = newValue ? UIColor.black : #colorLiteral(red: 0.6862131953, green: 0.686313808, blue: 0.6861912012, alpha: 1)
    }
}

Swift - Attribute string background color on next line

Simple solution: - Just add /n in the line one string - it will solve the issue

let attributedString = NSMutableAttributedString(string: "Line 1 Text\n" ?? "")
let attributesForNonSelectedRow = [NSAttributedString.Key.font:UIFont.systemFont(ofSize: 14, weight: UIFont.Weight.semibold),NSAttributedString.Key.foregroundColor:UIColor(rgb: 0x707070),NSAttributedString.Key.backgroundColor:UIColor(rgb: 0xE5E5E5)]
let myTitle = NSAttributedString(string: "Line 2 Text", attributes: attributesForNonSelectedRow)
attributedString.append(myTitle)
searchTitleLabel.lineBreakMode = .byWordWrapping
searchTitleLabel.numberOfLines = 0
searchTitleLabel.attributedText = attributedString

Solution via Constraints:

Why don't you just try to set the constraints for the label by providing Leading, Top and Height constraints, you can achieve it..

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