Question

as you can see in the first picture ,i’m using the UIWebview in my app.
But when i drag the second handle to the next paragraph , the selection become a rectangle box , i can only select the whole paragraph , how can i keep it just like the first picture?

Answer 1

from reading Using Copy, Cut and Paste Operations, you can see that iOS has implemented the UI selection for UIWebView, UITextView and UITextField for you, and thus what you are seeing is simply how selection works in these UI objects.

(and it is thus: so long as the user is within the bounds of a paragraph, then the user will be able to select a portion of the text in the paragraph as you have demonstrated in your first view; and if the user’s fingers run beyond the edges of the paragraph, the underlying UI code showing the selected area will attempt to select the smallest subset of items it can select, with entire paragraphs being considered an atomic unit at this level.)

given that the documentation referenced above describes only how to invoke the various cut/copy/paste/select actions when invoked from a menu (with some control over what appears in the UIMenuController‘s menu, and some control over what you can do with the cut/copied selection in a UIPasteboard), there doesn’t seem to be a handy way to direct how the UI responds to the user controlling the edge of the selection. even going so far as extending UIWebView might give you the ability to capture the touch events necessary, but you wouldn’t be able to direct the resulting drawing of the selection through documented API of UIWebView.

and so, without mucking with non-public API, it’s a little hard to imagine how you could have a more precise fine-grain control over selecting text spanning paragraphs unless you go to the length of implementing your own class to capture the touch-events necessary to control he selection and then process the events to draw the selection around the edges that you prefer. in other words, you’d sort of have to re-invent UIWebView and all that it does, with the exception of your special code for selections spanning textual paragraphs.

sorry.