How to get a selected range of text from a UITextView or UITextField

Question

I am trying to get the selected range of text from a UITextView (and or UITextField) so that I can edit the selected text, or modify an attributed string. The method below is triggered when I make a selection, but the code in the method returns null values.

- (void)textViewDidChangeSelection:(UITextView *)textView {

    UITextRange *selectedRange = [textField selectedTextRange];

    NSLog(@"Start: %@ <> End: %@", selectedRange.start, selectedRange.end);

}

Answer 1

You can try this,

- (void)textViewDidChangeSelection:(UITextView *)textView {

   UITextRange *selectedRange = [textView selectedTextRange];
   NSString *selectedText = [textView textInRange:selectedRange];
}

Answer 2

Swift

First get the selected text range, and then use that range to get the actual text:

if let textRange = myTextView.selectedTextRange {

    let selectedText = myTextView.text(in: textRange)

    // ...
}

Notes:

• Selecting text from a UITextField is done in the same way.
• The range is a UITextRange, not an NSRange. This allows for proper selection of things like emoji and extended grapheme clusters. See this answer for related details about this.