ios - why can't I use secureTextEntry with a UTF-8 keyboard?

Question

All, I ran into this problem where for a UITextField that has secureTextEntry=YES, I cannot get any UTF-8 keyboards(Japanese, Arabic, etc.) to show, only non UTF-8 ones do(English, French, etc..). I did alot of searching on Google, on this site, and on Apple dev forums and see others with the same problem, but short of implementing my own UITextField, nobody seems to have a reasonable solution or an answer as to whether this is a bug or intended behavior.

And if this is intended behavior, why? Is there a standard, a white paper, SOMETHING someplace that I can look at and then point to when I go to my Product Manager and say we cannot support UTF-8 passwords?

THanks,

Answer 1

I was unable to find anything in Apple's documentation to explain why this should be the case, but after creating a test project it does indeed appear to be so. At a guess, I imagine secure text entry is disallowed for any language using composite characters because it would make character input difficult.

For instance, for Japanese input, should each kana character be hidden after it is typed? Or just kanji characters? If the latter, the length of time characters remain onscreen is long enough make secure input almost moot. Similarly for other languages using composite input methods.

This post includes code for manually implementing your own secure input behaviour.