CocoaDev

One might think he can use NSAttributedString RTFDFromRange:documentAttributes to pack his attributed string into NSData, and then unpack the data into the SAME attribtued string. But this does not work (tested on Jaguar):

// For simplicity I removed the release calls

// Create a file wrapper
NSFileWrapper *file = [[NSFileWrapper
    alloc] initWithPath:@"path to file"];

// Create an attachment
NSTextAttachment *attachment =
    [[NSTextAttachment alloc] initWithFileWrapper:file];

// Create an attributed string with the attachment
NSAttributedString *original =
    [NSAttributedString attributedStringWithAttachment:attachment];

// Pack the attributed string into NSData
NSData *data = [original RTFDFromRange:[original range]
                    documentAttributes:nil];

// Get it back
NSAttributedString *fromData =
    [[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithRTFD:data documentAttributes:NULL];

// It is not the same string!
if (! [original isEqualToAttributedString:fromData]) {
    NSLog(@"Failed");
}

If you look into the objects, you will find that converting to NSData and back added default paragraph style to the attributes.

and now to the realy strage thing: you add a default paragraph style using [NSParagraphStype defaultParagraphStyle], and the attributes seems indentical when you print them. But the object are still not equal!

Use NSArchiver and NSUnarchiver to get NSData from an attributed string

I’m not sure abut this. NSUnarchiver should unarchive data created by NSArchiver. But my context is getting data from the pastboad and returning it to the pasteboad using system services. I don’t know how the other programmer created the data object he or she put on the pasteboard for type NSRTFDPastboardType. The code here is actually part of the test code for the service. I wan’t to send an attributed string, and check that it comes back identical, or only with specific changes. It works for string and attributed strings - but when you add an attachment, it breaks.