UIColor+colorWithHex: a category to get an UIColor from a hexadecimal integer value or string

I always find it really cumbersome to instantiate an UIColor object from a hexadecimal color value. To make life a bit easier I wrote this category for the UIColor class:

@interface UIColor (ColorWithHex) 

+(UIColor*)colorWithHexValue:(uint)hexValue andAlpha:(float)alpha;
+(UIColor*)colorWithHexString:(NSString *)hexString andAlpha:(float)alpha;

@end

@implementation UIColor (ColorWithHex)

+(UIColor*)colorWithHexValue:(uint)hexValue andAlpha:(float)alpha {
    return [UIColor  
                colorWithRed:((float)((hexValue & 0xFF0000) >> 16))/255.0 
                green:((float)((hexValue & 0xFF00) >> 8))/255.0 
                blue:((float)(hexValue & 0xFF))/255.0 
                alpha:alpha];
}

+(UIColor*)colorWithHexString:(NSString*)hexString andAlpha:(float)alpha {
    UIColor *col;
    hexString = [hexString stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"#" 
                           withString:@"0x"];
    uint hexValue;
    if ([[NSScanner scannerWithString:hexString] scanHexInt:&hexValue]) {
        col = [self colorWithHexValue:hexValue andAlpha:alpha];
    } else {
        // invalid hex string         
        col = [self blackColor];
    }
    return col;
}

@end

Because I often need to convert a hex string (e.g. from a parsed XML file) to an UIColor I added 2 methods to this category. You can now get an UIColor from a hexadecimal uint value or an NSString that can have the 3 following formats: “0xFFFFFF“, “#FFFFFF” or “FFFFFF“.

Just add this category to your project and you can use it like this:

UIColor *col1 = [UIColor colorWithHexValue:0xFFFFFF andAlpha:1.0];
UIColor *col2 = [UIColor colorWithHexString:@"0xFFFFFF" andAlpha:1.0];

You can download the category here.

Feel free to use it.