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

To do this first subclass the UITextView

and in the implementation do the following

- (void)touchesBegan:(NSSet<UITouch *> *)touches withEvent:(nullable UIEvent *)event
{
    self.selectable = NO;
}

- (void)touchesCancelled:(nullable NSSet<UITouch *> *)touches withEvent:(nullable UIEvent *)event
{
        self.selectable = YES;
 }

this should work fine,

Answer 2

You can disable text selection by subclassing UITextView.

The below solution is:

• compatible with isScrollEnabled
• compatible with loupe/magnifier
• but not compatible with links (see here for a solution compatible with links)

/// Class to disallow text selection
/// while keeping support for loupe/magnifier and scrolling
/// https://stackoverflow.com/a/49428248/1033581
class UnselectableTextView: UITextView {

    override init(frame: CGRect, textContainer: NSTextContainer?) {
        super.init(frame: frame, textContainer: textContainer)
        commonInit()
    }
    required init?(coder aDecoder: NSCoder) {
        super.init(coder: aDecoder)
        commonInit()
    }
    private func commonInit() {
        // prevents selection from loupe/magnifier (_UITextSelectionForceGesture), multi tap, tap and a half, etc.
        // without losing the loupe/magnifier or scrolling
        // but we lose taps on links
        addSubview(transparentOverlayView)
    }
    let transparentOverlayView: UIView = {
        $0.backgroundColor = .clear
        $0.autoresizingMask = [.flexibleHeight, .flexibleWidth]
        return $0
    }(UIView())
    override var contentSize: CGSize {
        didSet {
            transparentOverlayView.frame = CGRect(origin: .zero, size: contentSize)
        }
    }

    // required to prevent blue background selection from any situation
    override var selectedTextRange: UITextRange? {
        get { return nil }
        set {}
    }
}

Answer 3

Issue How disable Copy, Cut, Select, Select All in UITextView has a workable solution to this that I've just implemented and verified:

Subclass UITextView and overwrite canBecomeFirstResponder:

- (BOOL)canBecomeFirstResponder {
    return NO;
}

Note that this disables links and other tappable text content.

Answer 4

UITextView's selectable property:

This property controls the ability of the user to select content and interact with URLs and text attachments. The default value is YES.

Answer 5

I've found that calling

[textView setUserInteractionEnabled:NO];

works quite well.