Max length UITextField

With Swift 5 and iOS 12, try the following implementation of textField(_:shouldChangeCharactersIn:replacementString:) method that is part of the UITextFieldDelegate protocol:

func textField(_ textField: UITextField, shouldChangeCharactersIn range: NSRange, replacementString string: String) -> Bool {
    guard let textFieldText = textField.text,
        let rangeOfTextToReplace = Range(range, in: textFieldText) else {
            return false
    }
    let substringToReplace = textFieldText[rangeOfTextToReplace]
    let count = textFieldText.count - substringToReplace.count + string.count
    return count <= 10
}

• The most important part of this code is the conversion from range (NSRange) to rangeOfTextToReplace (Range<String.Index>). See this video tutorial to understand why this conversion is important.
• To make this code work properly, you should also set the textField's smartInsertDeleteType value to UITextSmartInsertDeleteType.no. This will prevent the possible insertion of an (unwanted) extra space when performing a paste operation.

The complete sample code below shows how to implement textField(_:shouldChangeCharactersIn:replacementString:) in a UIViewController:

import UIKit

class ViewController: UIViewController, UITextFieldDelegate {

    @IBOutlet var textField: UITextField! // Link this to a UITextField in Storyboard

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()

        textField.smartInsertDeleteType = UITextSmartInsertDeleteType.no
        textField.delegate = self
    }

    func textField(_ textField: UITextField, shouldChangeCharactersIn range: NSRange, replacementString string: String) -> Bool {
        guard let textFieldText = textField.text,
            let rangeOfTextToReplace = Range(range, in: textFieldText) else {
                return false
        }
        let substringToReplace = textFieldText[rangeOfTextToReplace]
        let count = textFieldText.count - substringToReplace.count + string.count
        return count <= 10
    }

}

I do it like this:

func checkMaxLength(textField: UITextField!, maxLength: Int) {
    if (countElements(textField.text!) > maxLength) {
        textField.deleteBackward()
    }
}

The code works for me. But I work with storyboard. In Storyboard I add an action for the text field in the view controller on editing changed.

Update for Swift 4

 func textField(_ textField: UITextField, shouldChangeCharactersIn range: NSRange, replacementString string: String) -> Bool {
     guard let text = textField.text else { return true }
     let newLength = text.count + string.count - range.length
     return newLength <= 10
}