UITextView disabling text selection

Question

I\'m having a hard time getting the UITextView to disable the selecting of the text.

I\'ve tried:

canCancelContentTouches = YES;
         


        

Answer 1

It sounds like what you actually want is a giant UILabel inside a UIScrollView, and not a UITextView.

update: if you are on newer versions of iOS UILabel now has a lines property:

Multiple lines of text in UILabel

Answer 2

Did you try setting userInteractionEnabled to NO for your UITextView? But you'd lose scrolling too.

If you need scrolling, which is probably why you used a UITextView and not a UILabel, then you need to do more work. You'll probably have to override canPerformAction:withSender: to return NO for actions that you don't want to allow:

- (BOOL)canPerformAction:(SEL)action withSender:(id)sender
{
    switch (action) {
        case @selector(paste:):
        case @selector(copy:):
        case @selector(cut:):
        case @selector(cut:):
        case @selector(select:):
        case @selector(selectAll:):
        return NO;
    }
    return [super canPerformAction:action withSender:sender];
}

For more, UIResponderStandardEditActions .

Answer 3

For swift, there is a property called "isSelectable" and its by default assign to true

you can use it as follow:

textView.isSelectable = false

Answer 4

Swift 4, Xcode 10

This solution will

• disable highlighting
• enable tapping links
• allow scrolling

Make sure you set the delegate to YourViewController

yourTextView.delegate = yourViewControllerInstance

Then

extension YourViewController: UITextViewDelegate {

    func textViewDidChangeSelection(_ textView: UITextView) {
        view.endEditing(true)
    }

}

Answer 5

If you just want to prevent it from being edited, then set the UITextView's "editable" property to NO/False.

If you're trying to leave it editable but not selectable, that's going to be tricky. You might need to create a hidden textview that the user can type into and then have UITextView observe that hidden textview and populate itself with the textview's text.

Answer 6

Swift 4, Xcode 10:

If you want to make it so the user isn't able to select or edit the text.

This makes it so it can not be edited:

textView.isEditable = false

This disables all user interaction:

textView.isUserInteractionEnabled = false

This makes it so that you can't select it. Meaning it will not show the edit or paste options. I think this is what you are looking for.

textView.isSelectable = false