wentaozone / ictextview

UITextView subclass with optimized support for string/regex search and highlighting.

ICTextView

Authors

• Ivano Bilenchi (@SoftHardW)

Description

ICTextView is a UITextView subclass with optimized support for string/regex search and highlighting.

It also features some iOS 7 specific improvements and bugfixes to the standard UITextView.

Features

• Support for string and regex search and highlighting
• Highly customizable
• Doesn't use delegate methods (you can still implement your own)
• Methods to account for contentInsets in iOS 7
• Contains workarounds for some known iOS 7 UITextView bugs

Compatibility

Supported iOS versions: 4.x and above (match highlighting starting from iOS 5.x)

Supported iOS SDKs: 5.x and above

!!!WARNING!!! - contains ARC enabled code. Beware, MRR purists.

Installation

ICTextView can be installed via Cocoapods (just add pod 'ICTextView' to your Podfile, then run pod install) or as a Git submodule. Alternatively, you can clone this repo, or even just grab the ICTextView.h and ICTextView.m files and put them in your project.

ICTextView requires the QuartzCore framework.

#import "ICTextView.h" and you're ready to go.

Configuration

See comments in the #pragma mark - Configuration section of the ICTextView.h header file.

Usage

Search

Searches can be performed via the scrollToMatch: and scrollToString: methods. scrollToMatch: performs regex searches, while scrollToString: searches for string literals.

Both search methods are regex-powered, and therefore make use of NSRegularExpressionOptions. They both support animation, range restriction and custom end scroll positioning. See the #pragma mark - Constants section for further info about the atScrollPosition: parameter.

If a match is found, ICTextView highlights a primary match, and starts highlighting other matches while the user scrolls. Searching for the same pattern multiple times will automatically match the next result, you don't need to update the range argument. In fact, you should only specify it if you wish to restrict the search to a specific text range. Search is optimized when the specified range and search pattern do not change (aka repeated searches).

The rangeOfFoundString property contains the range of the current search match. You can get the actual string by calling the foundString method.

The resetSearch method lets you restore the search variables to their starting values, effectively resetting the search. Calls to resetSearch cause the highlights to be deallocated, regardless of the maxHighlightedMatches variable. After this method has been called, ICTextView stops highlighting results until a new search is performed.

Content insets methods

The scrollRangeToVisible:consideringInsets:[...] and scrollRectToVisible:animated:consideringInsets:[...] methods let you scroll until a certain range or rect is visible, eventually accounting for content insets. This was the default behavior for scrollRangeToVisible: before iOS 7, but it has changed since (possibly because of a bug). These methods support animation and scroll positioning, similarly to the search methods.

The other methods are pretty much self-explanatory. See the #pragma mark - Misc section for further info.

iOS 7 Bugfixes

Long story short, iOS 7 completely broke UITextView. ICTextView contains fixes for some very common issues:

• NSTextContainer bug: UITextView initialized via initWithFrame: had an erratic behavior due to an uninitialized or wrong NSTextContainer
• Caret bug: the caret didn't consider contentInset and often went out of the visible area
• characterRangeAtPoint: bug: characterRangeAtPoint: always returned nil

These fixes, combined with the custom methods to account for contentInset, should make working with ICTextView much more bearable than working with the standard UITextView.

Bugfixes introduced by ICTextView will be removed (or isolated) as soon as they are fixed by Apple.

License

ICTextView is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info.