Visible text in a NSTextContainer backed UITextView

You cannot easilly get the visible text of a NSTextContainer backed UITextView. If you look at the text or attributedText properties, you will get the whole text that you gave to your NSTextStorage object.

To get the currently displayed text, I use the following method on my NSTextView subclasses:

- (NSString *)visibleText {

    NSRange currentRange = [self.layoutManager glyphRangeForTextContainer:self.textContainer];

    if (currentRange.location != NSNotFound && currentRange.location + currentRange.length <= self.textStorage.length) {
        // It's safe to use range on str
        NSString *currentString = [self.textStorage.string substringWithRange:currentRange];

        return currentString;
    } else {
        return nil;
    }
}