Getting the length of an NSTextField's text property

Question

I am having a problem finding the length of a text field's text !

I searched here a lot and just found that it would work with textfield.text.length or something like that.
My problem is textfield.text is not working for me! If I write this code: textfield.text; then I get an error like this:

property "text" not found on object of type NSTextField

I have to find the length of an text field in order to limit the number of characters.

What should I do? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Most of the classes in AppKit, as opposed to UIKit, don't have properties. NSTextField doesn't even have a method called text . You need the stringValue method, which is inherited from NSControl

Answer 2

The generally accepted way of doing this (limiting the length of NSTextField) is by using the NSFormatter helper class. See Here

Answer 3

To limit the length you add the delegate methods to your controller by adding

< UITextFieldDelegate > 

in the header file. Then in the implementation add the following method:

-(BOOL)textField:(UITextField *)textField shouldChangeCharactersInRange:(NSRange)range replacementString:(NSString *)string

In here just check the length and either return the string or just the string length you want.
You can get the length with:

[[textfield stringValue] length]

In interface builder be sure and add the file owner as the delegate to the text field