AutoLayout + RTL + UILabel text alignment

For me those solutions didn't help, and I ended up doing something pretty ugly but it's the only one that did the trick for me. I added it as an NSString category:

NSString+Extras.h:

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

@interface NSString (Extras)
- (NSTextAlignment)naturalTextAligment;
@end

NSString+Extras.m:

#import "NSString+Extras.h"

@implementation NSString (Extras)

- (NSTextAlignment)naturalTextAligment {
    NSArray *tagschemes = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:NSLinguisticTagSchemeLanguage, nil];
    NSLinguisticTagger *tagger = [[NSLinguisticTagger alloc] initWithTagSchemes:tagschemes options:0];
    [tagger setString:self];
    NSString *language = [tagger tagAtIndex:0 scheme:NSLinguisticTagSchemeLanguage tokenRange:NULL sentenceRange:NULL];
    if ([language rangeOfString:@"he"].location != NSNotFound || [language rangeOfString:@"ar"].location != NSNotFound) {
        return NSTextAlignmentRight;
    } else {
        return NSTextAlignmentLeft;
    }
}
@end

To detect the language I used this SO answer.

Follow up from Ken's answer

Setting textAlignment to NSTextAlignmentNatural is not possible on UILabel, it will result in an exception getting thrown:

Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException',
reason: 'textAlignment does not accept NSTextAlignmentNatural'

It does work when using attributed text and this can be set in Interface Builder as shown:

However, it would appear that attributed text is not picked up when localising the storyboard.

To get around this I have left the UILabel configured as plain in Interface Builder and created an NSAttributedString with the label's text, set the alignment on the attributed string and assign it to the label's attributedText property:

-(void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];

    NSMutableParagraphStyle *paragraphStyle = [[NSMutableParagraphStyle alloc] init];
    paragraphStyle.alignment = NSTextAlignmentNatural;

    NSMutableAttributedString *string = [[NSMutableAttributedString alloc] initWithString:self.lbl.text];
    [string addAttribute:NSParagraphStyleAttributeName
                   value:paragraphStyle
                   range:NSMakeRange(0, string.length)];

    self.lbl.attributedText = string;
}

This works fine in this simple case but I can see it falling over when you need more complex attributed string styling. But obviously in that case you'd probably just be using NSLocalizedString or equivalents when creating the NSAttributedString.

You want NSTextAlignmentNatural. That infers the text alignment from the loaded application language (not from the script).

For iOS 9 and later (using Xcode 7), you can set this in the storyboard (choose the --- alignment option). If you need to target earlier releases, you'll need to create an outlet to the label and set the alignment in awakeFromNib.

- (void)awakeFromNib {
    [[self label] setTextAlignment:NSTextAlignmentNatural];
}