Select Bold and Italicized text from textField - ios

Question

How can I select only bold and italicized text entered by user in a textField/textView ?
We can make a selected text bold, italicized, underline and any combination of these three but what about its vice-versa.
*This is not specific to Mac OSX or iOS, solution in either one is good for me.
EDIT:
I tried by reading the text in attributed string as :
NSAttributedString *string=self.textView.string;
But as textView and textField returns NSString so all formatting is gone.

Answer 1

on iOS use attributedText properties with labels/textfields
on OSX use attributedStringValue
you can then enumerate through the attributedText's attributes and check each attribute. Ill whip up some code (osx & iOS)
NSMutableAttributedString *str = [[NSMutableAttributedString alloc] initWithString:#"none "];
id temp = [[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithString:#"bold " attributes:#{NSFontAttributeName: [UIFont boldSystemFontOfSize:12]}];
[str appendAttributedString:temp];
temp = [[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithString:#"italic " attributes:#{NSFontAttributeName: [UIFont italicSystemFontOfSize:12]}];
[str appendAttributedString:temp];
temp = [[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithString:#"none " attributes:#{NSFontAttributeName: [UIFont systemFontOfSize:12]}];
[str appendAttributedString:temp];
temp = [[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithString:#"bold2 " attributes:#{NSFontAttributeName: [UIFont boldSystemFontOfSize:12]}];
[str appendAttributedString:temp];
self.label.attributedText = str;
NSMutableString *italics = [NSMutableString string];
NSMutableString *bolds = [NSMutableString string];
NSMutableString *normals = [NSMutableString string];
for (int i=0; i<str.length; i++) {
//could be tuned: MOSTLY by taking into account the effective range and not checking 1 per 1
//warn: == might work now but maybe i'd be cooler to check font traits using CoreText
UIFont *font = [str attribute:NSFontAttributeName atIndex:i effectiveRange:nil];
if(font == [UIFont italicSystemFontOfSize:12]) {
[italics appendString:[[str mutableString] substringWithRange:NSMakeRange(i, 1)]];
} else if(font == [UIFont boldSystemFontOfSize:12]){
[bolds appendString:[[str mutableString] substringWithRange:NSMakeRange(i, 1)]];
} else {
[normals appendString:[[str mutableString] substringWithRange:NSMakeRange(i, 1)]];
}
}
NSLog(#"%#", italics);
NSLog(#"%#", bolds);
NSLog(#"%#", normals);
Now here is how to find it. Deducing a selection range from this should be easy peasy :)
Note: you can only have a continuous selection! neither on osx nor on ios can you select n parts of a textfield/textview