Searching text from UITextView in iPhone

Question

I'm developing an application for the iPhone where some text is shown in a UITextView. I want to search for a specific word in the text and then show the text with that specific word colored. If anyone can help me solve this, I'll be very glad.

Answer 1

UITextView does not allow any formatting of the text within it. If the text is static (i.e. doesn't need to be edited), use a UIWebView instead; that will allow you to apply HTML formatting.

If a web view isn't an option, your best bet will be to try to calculate where the text in question will fall in the text view and then draw some sort of highlight around it. NSString has some methods to calculate how much space you need to draw a given string on screen; by being very, very clever with those methods, you may be able to work out where the word you're trying to highlight is. Unfortunately, this will not be at all simple.

If you do come up with a solution, everyone here would probably love to hear about it!