Question

Currently I’m programming an app with a tableView, similar to that one in the iPhone Contacts app.

Everything works (the sections, the bar on the right showing the titles, the cells are configured…), beside the search bar. I’m familiar how to do this (search) if the tableView’s data is loaded from an array, but my situation is that its loaded from arrays located in a NSDictionary.

The dict looks like

Key = "A" >> Value = "array = apple, animal, alphabet, abc ..."
Key = "B" >> Value = "array = bat, ball, banana ..."

How can I remove all strings (from all of the dictionary’s arrays) matching the search term?

Thanks a lot in advance 🙂

Answer 1

Well you can do it like this

NSMutableDictionary *newItems = [NSMutableDictionary dictionary];
for (NSString *key in oldItems) {
    NSMutableArray *newArray = [NSMutableArray array];
    for (NSString *item in [oldItems objectForKey:key]) {
        if ([item rangeOfString:searchTerm].location != NSNotFound) {
            [newArray addObject:item];
        }
    }
    if ([newArray count]) {
        [newItems setObject:newArray forKey:key];
    }
}
[oldItems release];
oldItems = [newItems retain];

I don’t know if this is the best way to do it or even if it’s faster enough but let me know if this works for you.