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 click

Answer 1

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