textview - put cursor at end of text when start editing - ios

Question

I am editing text in a UITextView. When the field opens for editing I need the cursor to be positioned after the final character of the existing text. The behavior I see is that the cursor is positioned more or less under the point where I touch the UITextView to start editing -- perhaps at the end of the word I touch on. I have tried setting the textview.selectedRange in both textViewDidBeginEditing: and textViewShouldBeginEditing: but that had no effect at all. I tried selecting ranges of the existing text, like {1,2} and that didn't do anything either. It seems like the selectedRange is more-or-less a read-only value?
- (void) textViewDidBeginEditing:(UITextView *)textView {
// Position the insertion cursor at the end of any existing text
NSRange insertionPoint = NSMakeRange([textView.text length], 0);
textView.selectedRange = insertionPoint;
}
How do I get the cursor to the end of the text?

Answer 1

The post referred to by the comment by artud2000 contains a working answer. To summarize here, add:
EDIT: The original answer was not sufficient. I've added toggling the editable property which seems to be sufficient. The problem is that the tap gesture only goes to the handler a single time (at most) and subsequent taps on the UITextField start editing directly. If it isn't editable then the UITextView's gesture recognizers are not active and the one I placed will work. This may well not be a good solution but it does seem to work.
- (void)viewDidLoad {
...
tapDescription = [[UITapGestureRecognizer alloc]
initWithTarget:self action:#selector(tapDescription:)];
[self.descriptionTextView addGestureRecognizer:tapDescription];
self.descriptionTextView.editable = NO; // if not set in storyboard
}
- (void) tapDescription:(UIGestureRecognizer *)gr {
self.descriptionTextView.editable = YES;
[self.descriptionTextView becomeFirstResponder];
}
- (void) textViewDidEndEditing:(UITextView *)textView {
//whatever else you need to do
textView.editable = NO;
}
The default position of the cursor seems to be after any existing text which solved my problem, but if you want to you can select the text in textViewDidBeginEditing: by setting the selectedRange -- for instance:
- (void) textViewDidBeginEditing:(UITextView *)textView {
// Example: to select the second and third characters when editing starts...
NSRange insertionPoint = NSMakeRange(1, 2);
textView.selectedRange = insertionPoint;
}

Answer 2

Thanks for the answer Charlie Price. I used it to solve my similar problem on a UITextView. Here's the answer in Swift in case anyone needs it:
...
let tapDescription = UITapGestureRecognizer(target: self, action: #selector(MyViewController.tapDescription(_:)))
self.descriptionTextView.addGestureRecognizer(tapDescription)
self.descriptionTextView.editable = false
...
func tapDescription(gr: UIGestureRecognizer) {
self.descriptionTextView.editable = true
self.descriptionTextView.becomeFirstResponder()
}
func textViewDidEndEditing(textView: UITextView) {
self.descriptionTextView.editable = false
}