How do I use subscript and superscript in Swift?

Most of the answers+examples are in ObjC, but this is how to do it in Swift.

let font:UIFont? = UIFont(name: "Helvetica", size:20)
let fontSuper:UIFont? = UIFont(name: "Helvetica", size:10)
let attString:NSMutableAttributedString = NSMutableAttributedString(string: "6.022*1023", attributes: [.font:font!])
attString.setAttributes([.font:fontSuper!,.baselineOffset:10], range: NSRange(location:8,length:2))
labelVarName.attributedText = attString

This gives me:

In a more detailed explanation:

1. Get UIFont you want for both the default and superscript style, superscript must be smaller.
2. Create a NSMutableAttributedString with the full string and default font.
3. Add an attribute to the characters you want to change (NSRange), with the smaller/subscript UIFont, and the NSBaselineOffsetAttributeName value is the amount you want to offset it vertically.
4. Assign it to your UILabel

Hopefully this helps other Swift devs as I needed this as well.

As a different approach, I wrote a function that takes in a string where the exponents are prepended with ^ such as 2^2•3•5^2 and returns 2²•3•5²

func exponentize(str: String) -> String {

    let supers = [
        "1": "\u{00B9}",
        "2": "\u{00B2}",
        "3": "\u{00B3}",
        "4": "\u{2074}",
        "5": "\u{2075}",
        "6": "\u{2076}",
        "7": "\u{2077}",
        "8": "\u{2078}",
        "9": "\u{2079}"]

    var newStr = ""
    var isExp = false
    for (_, char) in str.characters.enumerate() {
        if char == "^" {
            isExp = true
        } else {
            if isExp {
                let key = String(char)
                if supers.keys.contains(key) {
                    newStr.append(Character(supers[key]!))
                } else {
                    isExp = false
                    newStr.append(char)
                }
            } else {
                newStr.append(char)
            }
        }
    }
    return newStr
}

It's a bit of a brute force method, but it works if you don't want to deal with attributed strings or you want your string to be independent of a font.

If you can get along with text that doesn't look perfect, and only need a subset of characters you can make use of the unicode superscript and subscript numbers: ⁰ ¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ ⁸ ⁹ ₀ ₁ ₂ ₃ ₄ ₅ ₆ ₇ ₈ ₉ This has the advantage of being a lot less cumbersome.