Set the maximum character length of a UITextField in Swift

1. Your view controller should conform to UITextFieldDelegate, like below:

   class MyViewController: UIViewController, UITextFieldDelegate {
   
   }
   

2. Set the delegate of your textfield: myTextField.delegate = self

3. Implement the method in your view controller:

   textField(_:shouldChangeCharactersInRange:replacementString:)
   

All together:

class MyViewController: UIViewController, UITextFieldDelegate  // Set delegate to class

@IBOutlet var mytextField: UITextField             //  textfield variable

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()
    mytextField.delegate = self                  // set delegate
}


func textField(textField: UITextField, shouldChangeCharactersInRange range: NSRange,
                       replacementString string: String) -> Bool
{
    let maxLength = 4
    let currentString: NSString = textField.text
    let newString: NSString =  currentString.stringByReplacingCharactersInRange(range, withString: string)

    return newString.length <= maxLength
}

For Swift 4

func textField(_ textField: UITextField, shouldChangeCharactersIn range: NSRange, replacementString string: String) -> Bool {
    let maxLength = 1
    let currentString: NSString = (textField.text ?? "") as NSString
    let newString: NSString =  currentString.replacingCharacters(in: range, with: string) as NSString

    return newString.length <= maxLength
}

For Swift 5

func textField(_ textField: UITextField, shouldChangeCharactersIn range: NSRange, replacementString string: String) -> Bool {
    let maxLength = 1
    let currentString = (textField.text ?? "") as NSString
    let newString = currentString.replacingCharacters(in: range, with: string)

    return newString.count <= maxLength
}

Allowing only a specified set of characters to be entered into a given text field

func textField(textField: UITextField, shouldChangeCharactersInRange range: NSRange, replacementString string: String) -> Bool {
    var result = true

    if mytextField == textField {
        if count(string) > 0 {
            let disallowedCharacterSet = NSCharacterSet(charactersInString: "0123456789.-").invertedSet
            let replacementStringIsLegal = string.rangeOfCharacterFromSet(disallowedCharacterSet) == nil
            result = replacementStringIsLegal
        }
    }

    return result
}

How to program an iOS text field that takes only numeric input with a maximum length