Tap gesture to part of a UITextView

Question

I have this code:

UITapGestureRecognizer *singleTap = [[UITapGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithTarget:self action:@selector(tapResponse)];
singleTap.numberOfTapsRequired = 1;
[_textView addGestureRecognizer:singleTap];

This will react to the entire UITextView, but is it possible to change it so that it only responds to when a certain part of the string in the UITextView is tapped? Like a URL for example?

Hubie

Answer 1

You cannot assign tap gesture to particular string in normal UITextView. You can probably set the dataDetectorTypes for UITextView.

textview.dataDetectorTypes = UIDataDetectorTypeAll;

If you want to detect only urls, you can assign to,

textview.dataDetectorTypes = UIDataDetectorTypeLink;

Check the documentation for more details on this: UIKit DataTypes Reference. Also check this Documentation on UITextView

Update:

Based on your comment, check like this:

- (void)tapResponse:(UITapGestureRecognizer *)recognizer
{
     CGPoint location = [recognizer locationInView:_textView];
     NSLog(@"Tap Gesture Coordinates: %.2f %.2f", location.x, location.y);
     NSString *tappedSentence = [self lineAtPosition:CGPointMake(location.x, location.y)];
     //use your logic to find out whether tapped Sentence is url and then open in webview
}

From this, use:

- (NSString *)lineAtPosition:(CGPoint)position
{
    //eliminate scroll offset
    position.y += _textView.contentOffset.y;
    //get location in text from textposition at point
    UITextPosition *tapPosition = [_textView closestPositionToPoint:position];
    //fetch the word at this position (or nil, if not available)
    UITextRange *textRange = [_textView.tokenizer rangeEnclosingPosition:tapPosition withGranularity:UITextGranularitySentence inDirection:UITextLayoutDirectionRight];
    return [_textView textInRange:textRange];
}

You can try with granularities such as, UITextGranularitySentence, UITextGranularityLine etc.. Check the documentation here.

Ragsdale

that will display the link, but the gesture will react to all of the textView – Hubie

Yes. Once you tap on the link, it will open corresponding application based on the url scheme. – Ragsdale

Yeah but with a URL it open in safari, with a UITapGesture, I was hoping to have it open in my UIWebView – Hubie

Updated my answer. Check with that. – Ragsdale

Cool will have a play with that and update my answer in a bit:-) – Hubie

Try with different granularity options and you can update my answer with which ever worked for you. But this should guide you to right direction. – Ragsdale

Yes this definitely put me on the right path thanks:-) I just work out the final few little bits. – Hubie

Why do you remake the CGPoint in tapResponse:? – Accumulative