Classes

The following classes are available globally.

Hyphenator
An object that hyphenates text using the Knuth-Liang algorithm.

The Knuth-Liang hyphenation algorithm identifies likely points at which a word can be hyphenated, or split across two lines of text. By default, the hyphenate(text:) method inserts U+00AD (soft hyphen) at the calculated break points. This character is invisible unless the word occurs at the end of a line, and breaking would improve text flow. Then it is rendered as a normal hyphen.

The example below shows how to hyphenate a string, specifying the hyphen character as the separator:

Example
```
let hyphenator = Hyphenator()
hyphenator.separator = "-"

let text = "This algorithm identifies likely hyphenation points."
print(hyphenator.hyphenate(text: text)
// This al-go-rithm iden-ti-fies like-ly hy-phen-ation points.
```
The algorithm is designed to prioritize the prevention of incorrect hyphenations over finding every correct hyphenation—missing a single hyphenation rarely effects text flow meaningfully, but bad hyphenation can be rather noticable. Nevertheless, the algorithm may occasionally produce unexpected results for brand names or other unusual words. In this case, you may manually specify a desired hyphenation using exceptions.

Example
```
let hyphenator = Hyphenator()
hyphenator.separator = "-"

print(hyphenator.hyphenate(text: "Microsoft sesquipedalian"))
// Mi-crosoft sesquipedalian

hyphenator.addCustomExceptions(["Micro-soft", "ses-qui-pe-da-li-an"])

print(hyphenator.hyphenate(text: "Microsoft sesquipedalian"))
// Micro-soft ses-qui-pe-da-li-an
```
The library includes American English patterns by default. Patterns for many other languages are available online with varying licenses; see Hyphenation package README for more details.

Note

The Hyphenator class is thread-safe, and can be used to hyphenate on multiple threads simultaneously (although the performance benefits over using two instances are negligible).

Important

You should not apply the hyphenate(text:) method directly to strings containing HTML or code, as the code elements may be erroneously hyphenated. A safer approach is to use another tool capable of identifying HTML or code elements and applying hyphenation only to plain text content. See HyphenationPublishPlugin for an example hyphenating HTML using SwiftSoup.

See more
Declaration
Swift

public final class Hyphenator

Classes

Declaration