Can I force a UITableView to hide the separator between empty cells?

When using a plain-style UITableView with a large enough number of cells that the UITableView cannot display them all without scrolling, no separators appear in the empty space below the cells. If I have only a few cells the empty space below them includes separators.

Is there a way that I can force a UITableView to remove the separators in the empty space? If not I'll have to load a custom background with a separator drawn in for each cell which will make it harder to inherit behavior.

I found a somewhat similar question here, but I can't use a grouped UITableView in my implementation.

For iOS 7.* and iOS 6.1

The easiest method is to set the tableFooterView property:

- (void)viewDidLoad 
{
    [super viewDidLoad];

    // This will remove extra separators from tableview
    self.tableView.tableFooterView = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectZero];
}

For previous versions

You could add this to your TableViewController (this will work for any number of sections):

- (CGFloat)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView heightForFooterInSection:(NSInteger)section {
     // This will create a "invisible" footer
     return 0.01f;
 }

and if it is not enough, add the following code too:

- (UIView *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView viewForFooterInSection:(NSInteger)section
{        
    return [UIView new];

    // If you are not using ARC:
    // return [[UIView new] autorelease];
}

For Swift:

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()
    tableView.tableFooterView = UIView()  // it's just 1 line, awesome!
}

You can achieve what you want by defining a footer for the tableview. See this answer for more details:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1369831/eliminate-extra-separators-below-uitableview-in-iphone-sdk">Eliminate Extra separators below UITableView

Using the link from Daniel, I made an extension to make it more usable:

//UITableViewController+Ext.m
- (void)hideEmptySeparators
{
	UIView *v = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectZero];
	v.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
	[self.tableView setTableFooterView:v];
	[v release];
}

After some testings, I found out that the size can be 0 and it works as well. So it doesn't add some kind of margin at the end of the table. So thanks wkw for this hack. I decided to post that here since I don't like redirect.

Swift Version

The easiest method is to set the tableFooterView property:

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()
    // This will remove extra separators from tableview
    self.tableView.tableFooterView = UIView(frame: CGRectZero)
}

For Swift:

self.tableView.tableFooterView = UIView(frame: CGRectZero)

For newest Swift:

self.tableView.tableFooterView = UIView(frame: CGRect.zero)

If you use iOS 7 SDK, this is very simple.

Just add this line in your viewDidLoad method:

self.yourTableView.tableFooterView = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectZero];

Setting the table's separatorStyle to UITableViewCellSeparatorStyleNone (in code or in IB) should do the trick.

I use the following:

UIView *view = [[UIView alloc] init];
myTableView.tableFooterView = view;
[view release];

Doing it in viewDidLoad. But you can set it anywhere.

The following worked very well for me for this problem:

- (UIView *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView viewForFooterInSection:(NSInteger)section {

CGRect frame = [self.view frame];
frame.size.height =  frame.size.height - (kTableRowHeight * numberOfRowsInTable);

UIView *footerView = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:frame];
return footerView; }

Where kTableRowHeight is the height of my row cells and numberOfRowsInTable is the number of rows I had in the table.

Hope that helps,

Brenton.