The correct way to implement a placeholder in a UITextView (Swift)

UITextViewPlaceholder.swift

//
//  UITextViewPlaceholder.swift
//  TextViewPlaceholder
//
//  Copyright (c) 2017 Tijme Gommers <[email protected]>
//
//  Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
//  of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
//  in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
//  to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
//  copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
//  furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
//
//  The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
//  copies or substantial portions of the Software.
//
//  THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
//  IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
//  FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
//  AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
//  LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
//  OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
//  SOFTWARE.

import UIKit

/// Extend UITextView and implemented UITextViewDelegate to listen for changes
extension UITextView: UITextViewDelegate {
    
    /// Resize the placeholder when the UITextView bounds change
    override open var bounds: CGRect {
        didSet {
            self.resizePlaceholder()
        }
    }
    
    /// The UITextView placeholder text
    public var placeholder: String? {
        get {
            var placeholderText: String?
            
            if let placeholderLabel = self.viewWithTag(100) as? UILabel {
                placeholderText = placeholderLabel.text
            }
            
            return placeholderText
        }
        set {
            if let placeholderLabel = self.viewWithTag(100) as! UILabel? {
                placeholderLabel.text = newValue
                placeholderLabel.sizeToFit()
            } else {
                self.addPlaceholder(newValue!)
            }
        }
    }
    
    /// When the UITextView did change, show or hide the label based on if the UITextView is empty or not
    ///
    /// - Parameter textView: The UITextView that got updated
    public func textViewDidChange(_ textView: UITextView) {
        if let placeholderLabel = self.viewWithTag(100) as? UILabel {
            placeholderLabel.isHidden = !self.text.isEmpty
        }
    }
    
    /// Resize the placeholder UILabel to make sure it's in the same position as the UITextView text
    private func resizePlaceholder() {
        if let placeholderLabel = self.viewWithTag(100) as! UILabel? {
            let labelX = self.textContainer.lineFragmentPadding
            let labelY = self.textContainerInset.top - 2
            let labelWidth = self.frame.width - (labelX * 2)
            let labelHeight = placeholderLabel.frame.height

            placeholderLabel.frame = CGRect(x: labelX, y: labelY, width: labelWidth, height: labelHeight)
        }
    }
    
    /// Adds a placeholder UILabel to this UITextView
    private func addPlaceholder(_ placeholderText: String) {
        let placeholderLabel = UILabel()
        
        placeholderLabel.text = placeholderText
        placeholderLabel.sizeToFit()
        
        placeholderLabel.font = self.font
        placeholderLabel.textColor = UIColor.lightGray
        placeholderLabel.tag = 100
        
        placeholderLabel.isHidden = !self.text.isEmpty
        
        self.addSubview(placeholderLabel)
        self.resizePlaceholder()
        self.delegate = self
    }
    
}

"self.text.characters.count" is deprecated in Swift 4.2 and in the future may be disabled in turn. Xcode suggests changing "characters" to "string" or "substring" but it does not work. I was able to silence the warning by removing the "characters" without replacing with anything as can be seen in the attached example.

P.S .: Thanks for share this code, it helped me a lot.

Thanks for this. Two comments:

1. Missing: placeholderLabel.numberOfLines = 0 for longer placeholders.
2. You should call placeholderLabel.sizeToFit() after setting the placeholderLabel.frame size.

If you enter text programmatically then placeholder text not removed. I did following changes to make it work:

NotificationCenter.default.addObserver(self, selector: #selector(textViewDidChangeSelection), name: NSNotification.Name(rawValue: "TextViewDidChangeSelection"), object: nil)

When we enter text programmatically then textViewDidChangeSelection delegate method called; Here we can post notification. (This delegate method called in my app code because i need some custom logic in delegates)
func textViewDidChangeSelection(_ textView: UITextView) { NotificationCenter.default.post(name: Notification.Name("TextViewDidChangeSelection"), object: nil) }

Note: I removed self.delegate = self because, i need delegate methods for business logic; due to that, delegate methods were not calling.

@germs5 If you want to support multiline placeholder text then you just need to add below line of code in addPlaceholder function.

placeholderLabel.frame = self.frame

A small improvement to take insets into consideration:

let labelX = self.textContainerInset.left + textContainer.lineFragmentPadding

https://gist.github.com/tijme/14ec04ef6a175a70dd5a759e7ff0b938#file-uitextviewplaceholder-swift-L70

Hy! Thx for the gist.
It's better to change self.text.characters.count > 0 to !self.text.isEmpty.
The code doesn't compile on Swift 5.2, also it's better not to use any chasets to detect whether the string is empty.

Hi, I am new to this so please be nice lol but how do you actually use this???

Yeah, it should work with my changes

Hi, I am new to this so please be nice lol but how do you actually use this???

You can place this file in your project and then set do yourTextView.placeholder = 'test...'.

Just wanted to say thank you for such a simple solution.

Thanks @MoNTE48!