Limiting pasted string length in UITextView or UITextField

Question

The problem of limiting strings that are directly entered into a UITextView or UITextField has been addressed on SO before:

• iPhone SDK: Set Max Character length TextField
• iPhone sdk 3.0 issue

However now with OS 3.0 copy-and-paste becomes an issue, as the solutions in the above SO questions don’t prevent pasting additional characters (i.e. you cannot type more than 10 characters into a field that is configured with the above solutions but you can easily paste 100 characters into the same field).

Is there a means of preventing directly entered string and pasted string overflow?

Answer 1

I was able to restrict entered and pasted text by conforming to the textViewDidChange: method within the UITextViewDelegate protocol.

- (void)textViewDidChange:(UITextView *)textView
{
    if (textView.text.length >= 10)
    {
        textView.text = [textView.text substringToIndex:10];
    }
}

But I still consider this kind of an ugly hack, and it seems Apple should have provided some kind of "maxLength" property of UITextFields and UITextViews.

If anyone is aware of a better solution, please do tell.