Find rect/position of words in NSTextField - swift

Question

I have a NSTextField with a sentence in it. I want to find a rect (ideally) or position for each word in the sentence to do things in those positions (outside of the NSTextField).
Doing this in a NSTextView/UITextView seems achievable with NSLayoutManager.boundingRectForGlyphRange, but without the NSLayoutManager that NSTextView (and UITextView) have it seems a bit more challenging.
What is the best way for me to find the position of a given word in a NSTextField?

Answer 1

It requires one barely-documented bit of magic and another completely undocumented bit. Here's Objective-C code. Don't have it handy in Swift, sorry.
NSRect textBounds = [textField.cell titleRectForBounds:textField.bounds];
NSTextContainer* textContainer = [[NSTextContainer alloc] init];
NSLayoutManager* layoutManager = [[NSLayoutManager alloc] init];
NSTextStorage* textStorage = [[NSTextStorage alloc] init];
[layoutManager addTextContainer:textContainer];
[textStorage addLayoutManager:layoutManager];
textContainer.lineFragmentPadding = 2;
layoutManager.typesetterBehavior = NSTypesetterBehavior_10_2_WithCompatibility;
textContainer.containerSize = textBounds.size;
[textStorage beginEditing];
textStorage.attributedString = textField.attributedStringValue;
[textStorage endEditing];
NSUInteger count;
NSRectArray rects = [layoutManager rectArrayForCharacterRange:matchRange
withinSelectedCharacterRange:matchRange
inTextContainer:textContainer
rectCount:&count];
for (NSUInteger i = 0; i < count; i++)
{
NSRect rect = NSOffsetRect(rects[i], textBounds.origin.x, textBounds.origin.y);
rect = [textField convertRect:rect toView:self];
// do something with rect
}
The typesetterBehavior is documented here. The lineFragmentPadding was determined empirically.
Depending on exactly what you're planning to do with the rectangles, you may wish to pass { NSNotFound, 0 } as the selected character range.
For efficiency, you generally want to keep the text objects around instead of instantiating them every time. You just set the text container's containerSize and the text storage's attributedString to the appropriate values each time.

Answer 2

According the Ken Thomases answer. I made a adaptation for Swift 4.2
guard let textFieldCell = textField.cell,
let textFieldCellBounds = textFieldCell.controlView?.bounds else{
return
}
let textBounds = textFieldCell.titleRect(forBounds: textFieldCellBounds)
let textContainer = NSTextContainer()
let layoutManager = NSLayoutManager()
let textStorage = NSTextStorage()
layoutManager.addTextContainer(textContainer)
textStorage.addLayoutManager(layoutManager)
layoutManager.typesetterBehavior = NSLayoutManager.TypesetterBehavior.behavior_10_2_WithCompatibility
textContainer.containerSize = textBounds.size
textStorage.beginEditing()
textStorage.setAttributedString(textFieldCell.attributedStringValue)
textStorage.endEditing()
let rangeCharacters = (textFieldCell.stringValue as NSString).range(of: "string")
var count = 0
let rects: NSRectArray = layoutManager.rectArray(forCharacterRange: rangeCharacters,
withinSelectedCharacterRange: rangeCharacters,
in: textContainer,
rectCount: &count)!
for i in 0...count {
var rect = NSOffsetRect(rects[i], textBounds.origin.x, textBounds.origin.y)
rect = textField.convert(rect, to: self.view)
// do something with rect
}
All Credits to Ken Thomases