Set placeholder to UITextView in swift

Introduction to tutorial – set placeholder to UITextView:

Placeholder is a property associated with input UI components that works as a hint to the user in mobile app development. UITextField has placeholder property but there is no property for setting placeholder to UITextView in swift. So for adding placeholder to UITextView , we need to write some code as we don’t have pre-existing inbuilt placeholder property provided for UItextView in the iOS SDK for swift language. In this tutorial we will learn how to set placeholder property to UITextView or you can say setting placeholder to UITextView in swift language.

Follow the below steps to learn how to set placeholder to UITextView in swift4, swift3 or swift language.

Step1: Create a single view application project and name it “UITextViewPlaceholder”. Open “Main.storyboard” and drag UITextView to UIView of viewcontroller.

Step2: Add constraint to UITextView as shown in below figure

Step3: Open “ViewController.siwft” and create IBOutlet for UITextView, added in step 1.

	//
	// ViewController.swift
	// UITextViewPllaceholder
	//
	// Created by Aman Aggarwal on 23/03/18.
	// Copyright © 2018 iostutorialjunction.com . All rights reserved.
	//

	import UIKit

	class ViewController: UIViewController {

	@IBOutlet weak var txtVNotes: UITextView!

	override func viewDidLoad() {
	super.viewDidLoad()
	// Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.
	}

	override func didReceiveMemoryWarning() {
	super.didReceiveMemoryWarning()
	// Dispose of any resources that can be recreated.
	}


	}

view raw UITextViewPlaceholder-tutorial.swift hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Step4: Attach IBOutlet to UITextView in “Main.Storyboard”.

Step5: In “ViewController.siwft”, inside ‘viewDidLoad’ function set text that will act as placeholder to UITextVie. We will set its textcolor and font so that it looks like a placeholder. Also we will set UITextView delegate.

	//
	// ViewController.swift
	// UITextViewPllaceholder
	//
	// Created by Aman Aggarwal on 23/03/18.
	// Copyright © 2018 iostutorialjunction.com . All rights reserved.
	//

	import UIKit

	class ViewController: UIViewController, UITextViewDelegate {

	@IBOutlet weak var txtVNotes: UITextView!

	override func viewDidLoad() {
	super.viewDidLoad()
	// Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.

	txtVNotes.text = "Placeholder for UITextView"
	txtVNotes.textColor = UIColor.lightGray
	txtVNotes.font = UIFont(name: "verdana", size: 13.0)
	txtVNotes.returnKeyType = .done
	txtVNotes.delegate = self
	}


	override func didReceiveMemoryWarning() {
	super.didReceiveMemoryWarning()
	// Dispose of any resources that can be recreated.
	}


	}

view raw UITextViewPlaceholder-tutorial-step-5.swift hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Step6: If you run the app at this point, you will see UITextView displaying placeholder text.

If you type now, you won’t see placeholder stays there and text is getting appended to it. In order to remove placeholder as soon as use starts typing we need to take advantage of UITextView delegates methods.

Step7: Implement below code, here we are using UITextView delegate methods.

	//
	// ViewController.swift
	// UITextViewPllaceholder
	//
	// Created by Aman Aggarwal on 23/03/18.
	// Copyright © 2018 iostutorialjunction.com . All rights reserved.
	//

	import UIKit

	class ViewController: UIViewController, UITextViewDelegate {

	@IBOutlet weak var txtVNotes: UITextView!

	override func viewDidLoad() {
	super.viewDidLoad()
	// Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.

	txtVNotes.text = "Placeholder for UITextView"
	txtVNotes.textColor = UIColor.lightGray
	txtVNotes.font = UIFont(name: "verdana", size: 13.0)
	txtVNotes.returnKeyType = .done
	txtVNotes.delegate = self
	}

	//MARK:- UITextViewDelegates

	func textViewDidBeginEditing(_ textView: UITextView) {
	if textView.text == "Placeholder for UITextView" {
	textView.text = ""
	textView.textColor = UIColor.black
	textView.font = UIFont(name: "verdana", size: 18.0)
	}
	}

	func textView(_ textView: UITextView, shouldChangeTextIn range: NSRange, replacementText text: String) -> Bool {
	if text == "\n" {
	textView.resignFirstResponder()
	}
	return true
	}

	func textViewDidEndEditing(_ textView: UITextView) {
	if textView.text == "" {
	textView.text = "Placeholder for UITextView"
	textView.textColor = UIColor.lightGray
	textView.font = UIFont(name: "verdana", size: 13.0)
	}
	}

	override func didReceiveMemoryWarning() {
	super.didReceiveMemoryWarning()
	// Dispose of any resources that can be recreated.
	}


	}

view raw UITextViewPlaceholder-tutorial-step-7.swift hosted with ❤ by GitHub

textViewDidBeginEditing

In this delegate method, we detected if our UITextView begins editing and if the text matches to our placeholder text then set it’s text to empty string. Also we change textcolor and font so that user feels that he is writing and its not the placeholder which grows.

shouldChangeTextIn

This delegate method is used so that we can dismiss keyboard. As soon as user hits Done button of keyboard we detected new line as UITextView append new line (n) when user presses done or return key of keyboard (default implementation by iOS).

textViewDidEndEditing

In this delegate method, we do exactly opposite of what we done in first delegate method (textViewDidBeginEditing). Here, we detected if UITextView text is empty or blank then we set placeholder text, font, textcolor to it.

Run your app now and you will see placeholder for UITextView is working perfectly. Below are the screen shots of the output

Where to go from here:

In this tutorial we learned, how to set placeholder to UITextView in swift. Though there are so many libraries out there to handle this stuff of UITextView placeholder, this the most simplest way of setting placeholder to UITextView. You can grab the source code for this tutorial from

UITextView Placeholder swift source code