iOS Copy Paste phone from contacts to UITextField adds strange unicode characters

Question

The simplified scenario is the following.

• New project using Single View App template.
• Add a UITextField to the ViewController.
• Run the app an

Answer 1

I had exactly the same issue recently. Interestingly enough what you see in the debugger is unfortunately not what is actually pasted. If you copy the number to a different place and investigate it with your console for example you will get the following output:

>>> u"\U+202D(888) 5555-5512\U+202C"
u'\u202d(888) 5555-5512\u202c'
>>> name(u"\U+202D")
'LEFT-TO-RIGHT OVERRIDE'
>>> name(u"\U+202C")
'POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING'

So as you can see it is really two different invisible characters controlling the flow of the text.

In order to solve that I filtered out all unicode characters of the cF category. So you could do:

phoneLabel.text?.replacingOccurrences(of: "\\p{Cf}", with: "", options: .regularExpression)