Getting cursor position in a UITextView on the iPhone?

Question

We have a UITextView in our iPhone app which is editable. We need to insert some text at the cursor location when the users presses some toolbar buttons but can't seem to find a documented (or undocumented) method of finding the current location of the cursor.

Does anybody have any ideas or has anybody else achieved anything similar?

Answer 1

Like drewh said, you can use UITextView's selectedRange to return the insertion point. The length of this range is always zero. The example below shows how to it.

NSString *contentsToAdd = @"some string";
NSRange cursorPosition = [tf selectedRange];
NSMutableString *tfContent = [[NSMutableString alloc] initWithString:[tf text]];
[tfContent insertString:contentsToAdd atIndex:cursorPosition.location];
[theTextField setText:tfContent];
[tfContent release];

Answer 2

Swift 4:

// lets be safe, thus if-let
if let cursorPosition = textView.selectedTextRange?.start {
    // cursorPosition is a UITextPosition object describing position in the text

    // if you want to know its position in textView in points:
    let caretPositionRect = textView.caretRect(for: cursorPosition)
}

We simply use textView.selectedTextRange to get selected text range and cursor position is at its start position.