Stopping Copy/paste into Textfield.

Archived Forums Questions & Answers
1

Does anyone know of a way to stop a user from pasting text into a text field? We have a situation where we want users to type into a text field, but not paste into a text field.

The only way I could think of was to look at the text in a text field and if it changed by more than one character set it back to its prior text (but I don't know if it's possible to type fast enough that a user could theoretically have more than one character entered by the next time I draw the TextField and examine its contents. I'm hoping for something that would let me do this in a better way.

Thanks.

3 Answers

3
2

Well, a brittle idea is to cause some sort of invalidation upon CTRL down (for CTRL + V shortcut). I don't know if it is feasible, but you could perhaps disable the text field for a second or so if that button is pressed, and clean out any value entered.

Or if it is possible, just set the text to `string.Empty` when `Event.current.control == true`. I haven't tried this myself, you'll have to check if it works or not.

3

This almost works (C#) ...

string noPaste = "";
void OnGUI()
{
    string temp = GUILayout.TextField(noPaste);
    if (!Event.current.control)
        noPaste = temp;
}

It prevents pasting, but the text cursor still moves when the paste is performed. Not sure how to fix that part.

4

It will Work

using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

public class RestrictCharsInTextField : MonoBehaviour {

public  string text;

 void OnGUI()
 {
      text = GUI.TextField(new Rect(100,100,100,50), text, 10);
      text = Regex.Replace(text, @"[^a-zA-Z0-9.@ ]", "");

      if(Event.current.command || Event.current.control){  // cmd - for Mac   control - for windows

        text = "";
        }
 }

}

always welcome!

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Question: could someone still macro around this?

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This won't stop using Shift-Insert key combination on Windows.

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We use the Event.current.command check but also cache the string and revert it if its length has increased by more than 1, to catch the Shift-Insert case. In our case, the call's being made frequently enough for this to still allow fast typing, including repeated chars by holding a key down, as queried in the OP. But I guess that could vary, you'd have to try it.

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