Question

All,

I have a dictionary with two keys and values. I need to extract bits and pieces from them and place them into seperate strings.

{
        IP = "192.168.17.1";
        desc = "VUWI-VUWI-ABC_Dry_Cleaning-R12-01";
}

That is what the dictionary looks like when I call description.

I want the new output to be like this:

NSString *IP = @"192.168.17.1";
NSString *desc = @"ABC Dry Cleaning"; //note: I need to get rid of the underscores
NSString *type = @"R";
NSString *num = @"12";
NSString *ident = @"01";

How would I achieve this?

I’ve read through the Apple developer docs on NSRegularExpression but I find it hard to understand. I’m sure once I get some help once here I can figure it out in the future, I just need to get started.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Okay, so first, you have to get the object associated with each key:

NSString *ip = [dic objectForKey:@"IP"]; //Btw, you shouldn't start a variable's name with a capital letter.
NSString *tempDesc = [dic objectForKey:@"desc"];

Then, what I would do is split the string in tempDesc, based on the character -.

NSArray *tmpArray = [tempDesc componentsSeparatedByString:@"-"];

Then you just have to get the strings or substrings you’re interested in, and reformat them as needed:

NSString *desc = [[tmpArray objectAtIndex:2] stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"_" withString:@" "];
NSString *type = [[tmpArray objectAtIndex:3] substringToIndex:1];
NSString *num = [[tmpArray objectAtIndex:3] substringFromIndex:1];
NSString *ident = [tmpArray objectAtIndex:4];

As you can see, this works perfectly without using NSRegularExpression.