How do you make a UITextView detect link part in the text and still have userInteractionDisabled?

Question

I have a textView that is layered on a tableView cell. I need the user to click on the tableView row to open a viewController but if the textView has a link it must be clickable and that's it, no copy, select etc.

If I allow user interaction like this:

textView.userInteractionEnabled=NO;
textView.dataDetectorTypes =UIDataDetectorTypeLink;

the didSelectRowAtIndexPath is not called and I understand why but how to achieve this?

EDIT:

What I'm looking for is the ability to specifically identify link and allow user to click on the link to open a browser and disable interaction for the rest of the textView. Also the entire row should be clickable as said above.

Attached is the image of my tableView cell row which shows the link is detected and interaction is also possible but this disables the didSelectRowAtIndexPath inside the textView region.

Answer 1

If you are trying to add a UITextView with links to a cell, and want didSelectRow to be called when the user taps on anything but the link, then you should use hitTest:withEvent:

Swift 3

override func hitTest(_ point: CGPoint, with event: UIEvent?) -> UIView? {
    // location of the tap
    var location = point
    location.x -= self.textContainerInset.left
    location.y -= self.textContainerInset.top

    // find the character that's been tapped
    let characterIndex = self.layoutManager.characterIndex(for: location, in: self.textContainer, fractionOfDistanceBetweenInsertionPoints: nil)
    if characterIndex < self.textStorage.length {
        // if the character is a link, handle the tap as UITextView normally would
        if (self.textStorage.attribute(NSLinkAttributeName, at: characterIndex, effectiveRange: nil) != nil) {
            return self
        }
    }

    // otherwise return nil so the tap goes on to the next receiver
    return nil
}

I wrote an article about this with a bit more details.

Answer 2

One possible (and complex) solution would be using UIViews with UITapGestureRecogniser inside your UITextView.

• Firstly, you will need to find the NSRange of your link.

• Convert NSRange to UITextRange

• Use code similar to the following to add a UITapGestureRecogniser right on top of the link-text in your UITextView.

  UITextPosition *pos = textView.endOfDocument;// textView ~ UITextView
  
  for (int i = 0; i < words*2 - 1; i++){// *2 since UITextGranularityWord considers a whitespace to be a word
  
      UITextPosition *pos2 = [textView.tokenizer positionFromPosition:pos toBoundary:UITextGranularityWord inDirection:UITextLayoutDirectionLeft];
      UITextRange *range = [textView textRangeFromPosition:pos toPosition:pos2];
      CGRect resultFrame = [textView firstRectForRange:(UITextRange *)range ];
  
      UIView* tapViewOnText = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:resultFrame];
      [tapViewOnText addGestureRecognizer:[[UITapGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithTarget:self action:@selector(targetRoutine)]];
      tapViewOnText.tag = 125;
      [textView addSubview:tapViewOnText];
      [tapViewOnText release];
  
      pos = pos2;
  

  }

What I have done in this code is, got the UITextRange of relevant text, get it's firstRectForRange and added a transparent tap-able UIView right on top of it.

You would have to get the range of your link using some regEx, convert it to UITextRange, and add tap-able UIViews over them. In case, there might be more than one link in a single textView you might add a tag to each view corresponding to their 'link', and open that link in the target method by checking it's tag.

NOTE: If your UITextViews are universally un-editable, you might want to try TTTAttributedLabel instead. That is what I do in my UITableViewCells