My app allows users to format text in a UITextView by clicking some formatting buttons that apply attributes to the attributedText property of the text view. I want to allow users to copy their formatted text from one UITextView and paste it into another using the standard pasteboard and standard cut/copy/paste menu.
Currently if I copy formatted text from a UITextView and paste it into a new message in the Mail app, the formatting is preserved -- so the copying of formatted text is happening automatically. But if I paste the formatted text into another UITextView in my app, only the plain text appears.
By following the "Pasting the Selection" section in the Text Programming Guide for iOS, I was able to override the paste method of UITextView and intercept the pasted content:
- (void)paste:(id)sender {
UIPasteboard *pasteboard = [UIPasteboard generalPasteboard];
NSLog(#"types available: %#", [pasteboard pasteboardTypes]);
for (NSString *type in [pasteboard pasteboardTypes]) {
NSLog(#"type %# (%#): %#", type, NSStringFromClass([[pasteboard valueForPasteboardType:type] class]), [pasteboard valueForPasteboardType:type]);
}
}
This shows me that the pasteboard contains content in the following formats: com.apple.rtfd, public.rtf, public.text and "Apple Web Archive pasteboard type". The value for the text is a plain text string, the value for the rtf is an RTF string and the values for the two Apple formats are NSData.
This is where I'm stuck. How can I translate one of these items from the pasteboard data to an attributed string to set for the UITextView?
Or better yet, is there a way to configure the UITextView to accept formatted text automatically when pasting, in the same way that it supplies formatted text automatically when copying?
Duncan asked above, "Are you sure you have the uitextview set to handle rich text." I wasn't aware of a setting for that, but I checked the UITextView class reference again and found the allowsEditingTextAttributes property. I hadn't used that before because I was providing my own formatting buttons and didn't need to enable the system Bold/Italic/Underline options. But when I set that property to YES for my UITextView, then it started accepting formatted text automatically. Whew!
Related
I have a link within an attributed string that is being then set for a textview. For Accessibility purpose, I want that link to be called out as a link trait, is it currently possible for an attributed string to call out different traits within the string? If not what could be an ideal solution to do that then?
You can look for all the "style runs" of attributes within the text view's attributed text by calling attributes(at:longestEffectiveRange:in:) repeatedly until you come to the style run you want. Thus you can locate the link and obtain its value.
I am currently writing my first app on ios using swift 3. I have a plist that has a list of different pieces of information and each is a long paragraph with sections throughout it. for each section, I want to bold the text for the title or at least have the option to format it a certain way rather than just display all the text. I currently have a simple table view that displays text in a text view once tapped. I cannot figure out how to read the paragraph into a string, and compare parts of the string and bold that specific text.
For example, If I had a string that was read from the plist and said:
"My name is #Bob and I like to #dance."
How could I change "#Bob" to "Bob" and "#dance" to "dance" without hard coding it?
#IBOutlet var paragraphTextView: UITextView!
.
.
.
if let text = paragraph["Text"] {
paragraphTextView.text = text
}
The simplest solution is to use some HTML markup in the text in your plist file.
Instead of the plain text:
My name is #Bob and I like to #dance.
Use:
My name is <b>Bob</b> and I like to <b>dance</b>.
This gives you far more flexibility. You can add bold, underline, and italic simply by using the appropriate <b></b>, <u></u>, and <i></i> tags as needed. It also allows you to markup more general ranges than single words.
Once the text has the proper markup, you create an NSAttributedString from the marked up string and then set that to the text viewsattributedTextproperty instead of using thetext` property.
For a good example of how to create an NSAttributedString from HTML text, see HTML Format in UITextView
I have two pages long letter in textView. And all context of the letter should be shown in device's screen. I'm trying to achieve this by making the font smaller. The problem is that if I copy the letter into textView, it changes the font color to all black and format of the letter becomes weird.
I tried to edit the letter format in Storyboard but it's very hard. When I try to press "Enter" in textView, it doesn't put space between the lines but rather I come out from the textView.
Is textview the best place to put long context of the letter in? If so, how should format the letter in there?
To enter space use Option+Enter and if you are copying from text editor that support formatting then please remove all formatting then copy and paste it. to format text in textview use attributed string.
Why don't you format it in text editor and save it to a rtf file then, read the rtf into an attributed string, then set the attributedText of the text view? Like:
let textURL = NSBundle.mainBundle().URLForResource("MyLovelyLetter", withExtension: "rtf")
let options =[NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute: NSRTFTextDocumentType]
let attribText = try! NSAttributedString(fileURL: textURL!, options: options, documentAttributes: nil)
textView.attributedText = attribText
for example
I have been struggling with this. User needs to enter text and/or emoticons in a TextView. I got an emoticon keyboard with my own images to enter emoticons. Problem is I need to keep a symbol (e.g. "(smile)" for the emoticon within the text while AT THE SAME TIME showing the emoticon picture on top of the symbol.
So user would see "Hello [the picture]" while the TextView.text property would return "Hello (smile)".
On Android you can use Spanned strings which allow you to cover part of your text with an image. Thus on Android I managed to achieve my objective without problem.
On iOS, I thought Attributed Strings were a similar concept to Spanned but so far all I have been able to do is entirely replace the emoticon's code with the picture (using NSTextAttachment). Is there a way to achieve my objective without having to maintain one attributed string containing pictures and one separate string containing codes?
You can use this method, Hope it will work for you.
- (NSAttributedString*) parseEmoticons:(NSAttributedString*)text {
text = [text stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:#":-)" withString:#"😄"];
text = [text stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:#";P" withString:#"😜"];
text = [text stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:#"B-)" withString:#"😎"];
text = [text stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:#";-P" withString:#"😜"];
return text;
}
Having failed to find a more elegant solution, I resorted to maintaining one attributedstring containing the emoticon picture, and one regular string to hold the emoticon codes. So my attString is for instance "Hello [Smiling picture]" while my string is "Hello %101%". If you are interested in building a chatting app as I am, here is the pseudo code:
In emoticon keyboard:
{
Insert picture into attributed string at location loc;
Call textView shouldChangeTextInRange:(loc,0) replacementText:"%101";
}
In the view controller at shouldChangeTextInRange:(loc,length) replacementText:text:
{
Parse regular string to jump over emoticon codes already there to find the location matching loc;
Replace text (for instance %101%) in regular string} at the identified location.
}
Note: shouldChangeTextInRange is also called for regular keyboard entries including delete.
I want to insert a URL hyperlink into a UITextField that has different display text.
This is super easy in html:
Go To Google
How can I do this in iOS?
You can change the text style inside your UITextField via an attributed string sent to the text field's "attributedText" property.
However, what I suspect you really want to do is have a link that's clickable. I would recommend using a UIButton with a custom type (i.e. no border) and you can set the color and the underline style.
But like Evan said, if you have multiple lines of text, it may be smarter to use a UITextField where you set "editable" to NO and turn on the LINK traits (both of these you can do from the object inspector in Xcode).
Alright, so here's what I did to get what I wanted. I used UIWebView, and simply linked it to an html page in the project that has the text, and hyperlink at the bottom with different text displayed.
Answer is here :
If you want it as clickable Hyperlink,
NSString *string = #"Go To Google";
You need to add "BACKWARD SLASH" before ". That's it.