why does my font in UITextView changes style without a reason in swift?

Question

I have a UITextView in my swift app and I'm setting up the font in viewDidLoad:

let font = UIFont(name: "AppleSDGothicNeo-Light", size: 16.0)

myTextView.font = font

It works ok, when I run the app and writes something in the text view, I see:

Now, I have a method that checks given text and finds and highlights hashtags in it. The method is as follows:

func formatTextInTextView(textView: UITextView) {
    textView.scrollEnabled = false
    let selectedRange = textView.selectedRange
    let text = textView.text

    // This will give me an attributedString with the base text-style
    let attributedString = NSMutableAttributedString(string: text)

    let regex = try? NSRegularExpression(pattern: "#(\\w+)", options: [])
    let matches = regex!.matchesInString(text, options: [], range: NSMakeRange(0, text.characters.count))

    for match in matches {
        let matchRange = match.rangeAtIndex(0)

        let titleDict: NSDictionary = [NSForegroundColorAttributeName: UIColor(red: 244/255, green: 137/255, blue: 0/255, alpha: 1.0), NSFontAttributeName: font!]

        attributedString.addAttributes(titleDict as! [String : AnyObject], range: matchRange)
    }

    textView.attributedText = attributedString
    textView.selectedRange = selectedRange
    textView.scrollEnabled = true
}

I added this method to the:

func textViewDidChange(textView: UITextView) {
    formatTextInTextView(textView)
}

and now with every user's input I'm dynamically checking if it's a hashtag or not, and if it is - highlights the text to orange. At least it should be in theory. So this happens when the method is enabled:

As soon as I start writing text:

(this seems like a system font to me)

and when I add hashtag:

it works for the hashtag, but the rest of the text gets - seems like - default style. What's the problem here? :|

rmaddy · Accepted Answer · 2016-10-11T15:07:45.423

You need to specify your desired font when you initially create the attributed string, not just for the parts with a different color.

func formatTextInTextView(textView: UITextView) {
    textView.scrollEnabled = false
    let selectedRange = textView.selectedRange
    let text = textView.text

    let titleDict: NSDictionary = [NSFontAttributeName: font!]

    // This will give me an attributedString with the desired font
    let attributedString = NSMutableAttributedString(string: text, attributes: titleDict)

    let regex = try? NSRegularExpression(pattern: "#(\\w+)", options: [])
    let matches = regex!.matchesInString(text, options: [], range: NSMakeRange(0, text.characters.count))

    for match in matches {
        let matchRange = match.rangeAtIndex(0)

        let titleDict: NSDictionary = [NSForegroundColorAttributeName: UIColor(red: 244/255, green: 137/255, blue: 0/255, alpha: 1.0)]

        attributedString.addAttributes(titleDict as! [String : AnyObject], range: matchRange)
    }

    textView.attributedText = attributedString
    textView.selectedRange = selectedRange
    textView.scrollEnabled = true
}

I tried adding `textView.font = font` at the very beginning of method `formatTextInTextView`but that didn't work... is there anything else that could potentially work? — user3766930, Oct 11 '16 at 09:31
That's not at all what I suggested. You need to add the font as a property to the whole string when you create your attributed string. Right now you only apply the font to the colored portions of the attributed string. — rmaddy, Oct 11 '16 at 15:04

why does my font in UITextView changes style without a reason in swift?

1 Answers1