Get text range of link in UITextView

Question

I have a UITextView that contains a link and some other text. The link detection is enabled and working (iOS8). However, I am at loss to find the range of the link within the textView.

The idea is that the text is scanned (after link detection is done) and the link preloaded into a web view, so that when a user taps on an element somewhere, the web view can reveal itself.

How can I get the range of the detected link within a UITextView?

Answer 1

A way to do it, is to use enumerateAttribute:inRange:options:usingBlock:, where from my example attr is [yourTextView attributedText].

__block NSMutableDictionary *ranges = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init];
[attr enumerateAttribute:NSLinkAttributeName
                 inRange:NSMakeRange(0, [attr length])
                 options:0
              usingBlock:^(id value, NSRange range, BOOL *stop) {
    NSLog(@"Attribute: %@, %@", value, NSStringFromRange(range));
                  if (value)
                      [ranges setObject:value forKey:[NSValue valueWithRange:range]];
}];
NSLog(@"Ranges: %@", ranges);

I kept the range too, just in case, but you could use a NSArray with all the different links instead of a NSDictionary.

EDIT:
From your comments, I may assume that the link you mentioned are there because of the NSDataDetector. In a few words, it will detect from NSString if there is something like: "http://www.randomSite.com". You can read about NSDataDetector to get more info about it (it can detect phone numbers, mail adresses etc.), the UITextView often detect some by defaults. So the NSAttributedString may not incorporate the NSLinkAttributeName attribute.

So a work around (this time, I just kept the link, but I guess you know how to do if you want something like previous solution with the range too):

NSString *stringWithNSDataDetector = [yourTextView text];
NSError *error = nil;
NSDataDetector * dataDetector = [NSDataDetector dataDetectorWithTypes:NSTextCheckingTypeLink
                                                                error:&error];
//Check if (error) before
__block NSMutableArray *allMatches = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];
[dataDetector enumerateMatchesInString:stringWithNSDataDetector
                           options:0
                             range:NSMakeRange(0, [stringWithNSDataDetector length])
                        usingBlock:^(NSTextCheckingResult *match, NSMatchingFlags flags, BOOL *stop)
{
    if ([match resultType] == NSTextCheckingTypeLink)
        [allMatches addObject:[match URL]];
}];