Set password protection in UITextView

Question

Can i hide password in UITextView by * or any other symbol? I need to use UITextView instead of UITextField. I want to hide all characters of textView.

Answer 1

I like to share my own implementation after using the previous answers for a while in a chat-like app, where the UITextView is constantly filled and emptied.

My UITextView works as an entry of text for different kind of data types (phones, e-mails, etc.) and I did not want to create other UITextView specifically for handling this scenario, so I decided to subclass it and restructure a little bit the code because I faced with circumstances that the logic breaks when using an external keyboard or changing the text property programatically (doing the last one does not call the delegate method).

So first subclassing...

UITextView subclass

class MyTextView: UITextView {

    var isProtected = false // `true` for activate the password mode
    var plainText: String! = String() // Variable to save the text when `isProtected`

    override var text: String! {
        get { return isProtected ? plainText : super.text }
        set {
            if !isProtected {
                plainText = newValue
            }
            super.text = newValue
        }
    }
}

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PS: The overriding of the text property helps us to get always the plain text in the UITextView without calling other variables.

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Then, in the view controller where the delegate is implemented...

UITextViewDelegate

extension MyViewController: UITextViewDelegate {

    func textView(_ textView: UITextView, shouldChangeTextIn range: NSRange, replacementText text: String) -> Bool {

        if myTextView.isProtected {
            myTextView.plainText = (myTextView.plainText as NSString).replacingCharacters(in: range, with: text) // Basically: when is in password mode, saves all written characters in our auxiliar variable
        }

        return true
    }

    func textViewDidChange(_ textView: UITextView) {
        if myTextView.isProtected {
            textView.text = String(repeating: "•", count: textView.text.count) // Change every letter written with the character "•"
        }
    }

}

Finally, you only need to toggle the isProtected flag somewhere in MyViewController and that`s it:

myTextView.isProtected = true //or `false`

Answer 2

Create a global variable for password string.

var passwordString = ""

Then set delegates of UITextView like:

func textView(_ textView: UITextView, shouldChangeTextIn range: NSRange, replacementText text: String) -> Bool {
    passwordString = ((passwordString ?? "") as NSString).replacingCharacters(in: range, with: text)
    return true
}

func textViewDidChange(_ textView: UITextView) {
//replace character with * or anyother character
    yourtextView.text = String(repeating: "*", count: (textView.text ?? "").count)
}

and dont forget to do this:

yourTextview.delegate = self

Answer 3

Using an UITextView leaves the whole job of masking the text yourself. You also need to make sure you disable copying for security reasons. Set your delegate property and handle this something on these lines:

var originalText: String?

func textView(_ textView: UITextView, shouldChangeTextIn range: NSRange, replacementText text: String) -> Bool {
    originalText = ((originalText ?? "") as NSString).replacingCharacters(in: range, with: text)
    return true
}

func textViewDidChange(_ textView: UITextView) {
    textView.text = String(repeating: "*", count: (textView.text ?? "").count)
}

If you need to retrieve the value of the actual text that was input use the originalText property.