How to find the text in an NSTextView?

Question

I need to find the text in an NSTextView, and save it to a file. I can do the saving fine. I have used -stringValue, and -textStorage so far, but neither have worked. When I put -stringValue in, it just gave me (null), and when I put -textStorage in, it gave me a very large chunk of nothing (like a long paragraph of invisible text).

How can I put the text from an NSTextView into an NSString?

Answer 1

Try

NSString *text = [[myTextView textStorage] string];

The NSTextStorage inherits from NSMutableAttributedString which inherits from NSAttributedString. The latter implements the string method.

This isn't too obvious if you just look at the NSTextView's instance methods in the documentation.

Answer 2

Try this:

[myTextView string];

If you are struggling to write the textView stringValue into a file try something like this:

    [[myTextView string] writeToFile:@"someFile" atomically:YES encoding:NSUnicodeStringEncoding error:&error];

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

when setting value, use text.string = @"XXXX";
when getting value, use STRING = [text.string copy];

because if you forget copy, the mutableString will be deliver to STRING. This will raise bugs when you editing multiple things with a single textview.

Answer 4

In order to compile all of the information for anyone else with this question, I am answering my own question. If I am not allowed to do this, please tell me.

The code is actually extremely simple.

Files.h

#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>

@interface Files : NSObject {
    IBOutlet id dataToSave;
}

- (IBAction) saveData: (id) sender;

Files.m

@implementation Files

- (IBAction) saveData: (id) sender; {
    NSString *text = [[dataToSave  textStorage] string];
    NSLog(@"%@", text);
    [text writeToFile:@"Users/justin/Desktop/test.txt atomically:YES encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:NULL];
}

Instead of voting this up, vote for the other two people that answered this.