Get selection (highlighted text) string from NSTextView Objective-C

Question

How can I get the selected text's string from a NSTextView as an NSString?

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Since NSTextView is a subclass of NSText, you can use NSText instance methods to figure out the selected string like so:

NSString *selected = [[myTextView string] 
                      substringWithRange:[myTextView selectedRange]];

Answer 2

An NSText can have more than only one selection. Check it out with TextEditapp: select a string with the mouse while pressing CMD. So you can select as many strings as you want. Therefore I think, a more common solution is to use:

NSArray *ranges = [myTextView selectedRanges];

and then extract the strings one by one.