Preventing line breaks in part of an NSAttributedString

Question

I am working on a UILabel which features large main text followed by smaller text that tells you who said it:

Answer 1

@brian-nickel great solution in Swift 5.1 and in a String extension

extension String {
    var withoutLineBreak: String {
        self.replacingOccurrences(of: " ", with: "\u{a0}")
            .replacingOccurrences(of: "-", with: "\u{2011}")
    }
}

Answer 2

Following rmaddy's suggestion, I was able to get the effect I wanted by replacing spaces and dashes with their non-breaking alternatives:

Objective-C:

NS_INLINE NSString *NOBR(NSString *string) {
return [[string stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@" " withString:@"\u00a0"] 
                stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"-" withString:@"\u2011"];

}

NSAttributedString *username = [[NSAttributedString alloc] 
    initWithString:NOBR(hotQuestion.username) attributes:nil];
...

Swift (note the slightly different escape code format):

func nobr(_ string:String) -> String {
    return string
        .stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString(" ", withString: "\u{a0}")
        .stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("-", withString: "\u{2011}")
}

let username = NSAttributedString(string:nobr(hotQuestion.username, attributes:nil))

Answer 3

There is also word-joiner \u2060 character in Unicode which will prevent line break on its either side and is invisible. I used it to force word wrap when degree sign was part of word, so the whole word will stay on the same line, in iOS.

Objective-C:

text = [text stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"°" withString:@"\u2060°\u2060"];