Question

I would like to create a button that moves the cursor position in a UITextView one word at a time. From a user perspective, this would be the same as Option-Right Arrow in Mac OS X, which is defined as “go to the word to the right of the insertion point.”

I have found a couple ways to move on character at a time. How would you modify this to move one word at a time?

- (IBAction)rightArrowButtonPressed:(id)sender
{
     myTextView.selectedRange = NSMakeRange(myTextView.selectedRange.location + 1, 0); 
}

Thanks for any suggestions.

Answer 1

Was able to implement it like this,

- (IBAction)nextWord {
    NSRange selectedRange = self.textView.selectedRange;
    NSInteger currentLocation = selectedRange.location + selectedRange.length;
    NSInteger textLength = [self.textView.text length];

    if ( currentLocation == textLength ) {
        return;
    }

    NSRange newRange = [self.textView.text rangeOfCharacterFromSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]
                                                           options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch
                                                             range:NSMakeRange((currentLocation + 1), (textLength - 1 - currentLocation))];
    if ( newRange.location != NSNotFound ) {
        self.textView.selectedRange = NSMakeRange(newRange.location, 0);
    } else {
        self.textView.selectedRange = NSMakeRange(textLength, 0);
    }
}

- (IBAction)previousWord {
    NSRange selectedRange = self.textView.selectedRange;
    NSInteger currentLocation = selectedRange.location;

    if ( currentLocation == 0 ) {
        return;
    }

    NSRange newRange = [self.textView.text rangeOfCharacterFromSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]
                                                           options:NSBackwardsSearch
                                                             range:NSMakeRange(0, (currentLocation - 1))];
    if ( newRange.location != NSNotFound ) {
        self.textView.selectedRange = NSMakeRange((newRange.location + 1), 0);
    } else {
        self.textView.selectedRange = NSMakeRange(0, 0);
    }

}