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I'm trying to establish the start and end positions of a text selection of a UITextField instance, using its selectedTextRange property (as gained from the UITextInput protocol). However, I have no idea how to access the properties of the UITextPosition objects that make up the start and end properties of selectedTextRange.

Apple's docs on UITextPosition are woeful at this time, providing no methods or properties, though I know there are such properties in the object, because NSLogging one gives this:

<UITextPositionImpl: 0x6aaeb60>
<<WebVisiblePosition: 0x6aa40e0>(offset=5, context=([s|a], [u+0073|u+0061])>

In this example, the 'offset' is correct, and the context shows the characters either side of the selection point ('s' and 'a'), but I don't know how to access this nebulous WebVisiblePosition class. So, in short, is there a way of retrieving the details I want using UITextPosition objects from UITextField?

Cœur
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1 Answers1

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Of course, just after asking my question I found the answer, in this SO question: UITextPosition in UITextField.

It seems that when used as part of UITextField, the UITextPosition objects are not meant to be tinkered with directly, but used to feed other methods. In this case, the method offsetFromPosition:toPosition:, along with the text field property beginningOfDocument, can be used to return an NSInteger of a selection index.

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