iPhone UITextField - Change placeholder text color

adam picture adam · Aug 27, 2009 · Viewed 357.5k times · Source

I'd like to change the color of the placeholder text I set in my UITextField controls, to make it black.

I'd prefer to do this without using normal text as the placeholder and having to override all the methods to imitate the behaviour of a placeholder.

I believe if I override this method:

- (void)drawPlaceholderInRect:(CGRect)rect

then I should be able to do this. But I'm unsure how to access the actual placeholder object from within this method.

Answer

user1071136 picture user1071136 · Dec 4, 2012

Since the introduction of attributed strings in UIViews in iOS 6, it's possible to assign a color to the placeholder text like this:

if ([textField respondsToSelector:@selector(setAttributedPlaceholder:)]) {
  UIColor *color = [UIColor blackColor];
  textField.attributedPlaceholder = [[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithString:placeholderText attributes:@{NSForegroundColorAttributeName: color}];
} else {
  NSLog(@"Cannot set placeholder text's color, because deployment target is earlier than iOS 6.0");
  // TODO: Add fall-back code to set placeholder color.
}