Question

Hey guys I need to send the content of an NSMutableArray through email. I have a mailing function but I’m not sure on how to place the content of the array into a NSString to be displayed on the email under each other. Is there a way to place all the content of the array into the string with maybe HTML nextline command between each array element?

 NSString *emailBody = @"Need to put the body here";

Thanks

Answer 1

The simplest way is to call the array’s description method which will return a human readable plist in a NSString.

If you need to reconstitute the array from the email. You will need save the array as xml plist using the writeToFile: method. Then read the file back in as a string. To reconstitute you will need to extract the xml from the email, put it in a NSString, write that to file, then read it back into an NSArray.

(IIRC, there used to be a way to write to NSString as if it was a file but I can’t remember how to do it anymore. Probably, writing to a NSFileHandle and reading it back instantly.)

Edit:

Can you please explain more on the
array’s description method please.

Like so:

NSArray *myArray=[NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"Obj1",@"Obj2",@"Obj3",nil];
NSLog(@"myArray=%@",[myArray description]);

…prints:

myArray=(
    Obj1,
    Obj2,
    Obj3
)

For your project you can do:

NSString *arrayString=[myArray description];

The is also a descriptionWithLocale that will print the array in different languages. I don’t have a ready example for that. See NSArray, NSLocale and The Locales Programming Guide