SearchBar, how to change text color?

Question

My search bar has default gray text, but I want it to be white text. I can't figure out how to use swift to change the scope bar text color, and you are unable to do it from storyboard. The closest I've found is

searchBarOutlet.setScopeBarButtonTitleTextAttributes([NSForegroundColorAttributeName: UIColor.whiteColor()], forState:UIControlState.Normal)

but alas this won't work either. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Its a little hard to access the Textfield inside the UISearchbar.

This is how it works:

for subView in self.searchBarOutlet.subviews
    {
        for secondLevelSubview in subView.subviews
        {
            if (secondLevelSubview.isKindOfClass(UITextField))
            {
                if let searchBarTextField:UITextField = secondLevelSubview as? UITextField
                {
                    //set the color here like this:
                    searchBarTextField.textColor = UIColor.redColor()
                    break;
                }

            }
        }
    }

Shorter solution:

var textFieldInsideSearchBar = yourSearchbar.valueForKey(“searchField”) as? UITextField 
textFieldInsideSearchBar?.textColor = yourcolor

Answer 2

// My preferred way of accessing searchField

if let searchTextField = self.searchBar.valueForKey("searchField") as? UITextField {

  searchTextField.textAlignment = NSTextAlignment.Left

}

Answer 3

Swift 3

UITextField.appearance(whenContainedInInstancesOf: [UISearchBar.self]).textColor = UIColor.white

Answer 4

In my case for swift 3.0

(mySearchBar.value(forKey: "searchField") as? UITextField)?.textColor = UIColor.white