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

Answer 2

If you are trying to add a UITextView with links to a cell, and want didSelectRow to be called when the user taps on anything but the link, then you should use hitTest:withEvent:

Swift 3

override func hitTest(_ point: CGPoint, with event: UIEvent?) -> UIView? {
    // location of the tap
    var location = point
    location.x -= self.textContainerInset.left
    location.y -= self.textContainerInset.top

    // find the character that's been tapped
    let characterIndex = self.layoutManager.characterIndex(for: location, in: self.textContainer, fractionOfDistanceBetweenInsertionPoints: nil)
    if characterIndex < self.textStorage.length {
        // if the character is a link, handle the tap as UITextView normally would
        if (self.textStorage.attribute(NSLinkAttributeName, at: characterIndex, effectiveRange: nil) != nil) {
            return self
        }
    }

    // otherwise return nil so the tap goes on to the next receiver
    return nil
}

I wrote an article about this with a bit more details.

Answer 3

Maybe it will be ok for your purposes:

textView.editable=NO;
textView.userInteractionEnabled=YES;
textView.dataDetectorTypes =UIDataDetectorTypeLink;

But in fact UITextView uses UIWebView parts internally, and this way may be slowly in table cells.

I can advice to use CoreText or NSAttributedString's with touches. For example you may read this SO post.