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;

I've tried subclassing and overwriting:

- (BOOL)canPerformAction:(SEL)action withSender:(id)sender   

(But that gets called only After the selection)

- (BOOL)touchesShouldCancelInContentView:(UIView *)view;  

(I don't see that getting fired at all)

- (BOOL)touchesShouldBegin:(NSSet *)touches
                 withEvent:(UIEvent *)event
             inContentView:(UIView *)view; 

(I don't see that getting fired either)

What am I missing?

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

I've found that calling

[textView setUserInteractionEnabled:NO];

works quite well.

Solution 3

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.

Solution 4

Swift 4, Xcode 10:

If you want to make it so the user isn't able to select or edit the text.

This makes it so it can not be edited:

textView.isEditable = false

This disables all user interaction:

textView.isUserInteractionEnabled = false

This makes it so that you can't select it. Meaning it will not show the edit or paste options. I think this is what you are looking for.

textView.isSelectable = false

Solution 5

It sounds like what you actually want is a giant UILabel inside a UIScrollView, and not a UITextView.

update: if you are on newer versions of iOS UILabel now has a lines property:

Multiple lines of text in UILabel

View more solutions

Comments

[Epaga]

Since it's impossible to add answers to this: note the BEST answer here (IMHO) is actually a comment by Alexander: since iOS 7 there is a @property(nonatomic,getter=isSelectable) BOOL selectable NS_AVAILABLE_IOS(7_0)

[dizy]

Yea I guess. Will be the next thing I do if I don't figure this out.

[dizy]

I mentioned that I already tried that :) canPerform doesn't get called until after you make the selection

[Ilya Saunkin]

thanx dude, I don't know about dizy, but I actually needed a UILabel.

[Matt Chuang]

This will also disable the scrolling feature on UITextView

[barfoon]

And disable the ability to click links

[Zoltan Varadi]

I use the uitextview as a subview in a custom uitableviewcell. It works like a dream

[Dafydd Williams]

If you don't want any user interaction at all, yes.

[Albert Renshaw]

UILabel will prevent the line-breaks. You want a UITextView with no user interaction enabled... and then you want that inside of a UIScrollView. Alternatively, you could display a transparent UIWebView with your text in a textView in the UIWebView (just use loadHTML to import your text/code into the UIWebView (including the CSS code to make the background transparent) then you can use javascript to make it not selectable but still scrollable).

[Mark Amery]

@AlbertRenshaw I don't think your first sentence is correct. A quick Google seems to indicate that UILabel supports line breaks just fine.

[Albert Renshaw]

@MarkAmery Wow! I never knew! UILabel has a "lines" property that is on "1" by default... so if you put in multiple lines nothing will happen, you have to modify the "lines" property to a higher number to support multiple lines! Neat :)

[Mark Amery]

@AlbertRenshaw Don't make it higher - set it to 0 instead, and then you can have as many lines as you like.

[Albert Renshaw]

@MarkAmery you just made my day! Thankyou for the tip, that helps so much with future projects! Haha! :) +1

[Alexander]

Have you tried to use the property selectable? @property(nonatomic,getter=isSelectable) BOOL selectable NS_AVAILABLE_IOS(7_0); // toggle selectability, which controls the ability of the user to select content and interact with URLs & attachments

[junglecat]

This disables links, etc.

[Dafydd Williams]

A good point. In my case, I wanted links disabled, so I wasn't too fussed about that.

[Trespassers W]

Anyone know of a solution that does not disable links but does disable highlighting? I tried overriding long-press but that seems to disable link tapping as well...

[Pepsin]

@TrespassersW overwrite - (void)textViewDidChangeSelection:(UITextView *)textView and set textView.selectedRange = NSMakeRange(0, 0); can accomplish this

[Krivvenz]

This is what I did for a non editable / selected text field: class

[Gerard]

Downvote: this won't prevent the cut/copy/define toolbar from appearing - there are better solutions listed on this page.

[He Yifei 何一非]

seems like in iOS 10, this code disable selection and keep links & scrolling working at same time

[bauerMusic]

Even when disabling selection, user can still long-press and 'drag away' the url. In cases where this was meant to act as a button (and the URL, private), this behavior sure hammers in the final nail.

[ArielSD]

It seems like there is no setter in objective-C?

[user963601]

-[UITextView isSelectable]: developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uitextview/…

[ArielSD]

That looks like just the get - I'm seeing compiler errors when trying to set? textView.isSelectable = NO;

[user963601]

That's because -isSelectable is the name of the getter only. Use -[UITextView setSelectable:] to set it. With property syntax, both the getter and setter are selectable. BOOL foo = textView.selectable; or textView.selectable = bar;

[Mellao]

This one also disables links