Question

I am aware of NSStringFromClass.

My question relates to the situation where the same method is implemented in multiple classes in an inheritance tree, and you want to debugging information as to which class it is executing from.

Example:

Let us have three classes: A–>B–>C , inheriting as displayed by the arrows.

If each of them has a method foo(), defined:

-(void) foo
{
 // Do some work particular to the class it is in.
  .....
  //Each method ends with the debugging statement:
  NSLog("In foo of class:%$",NSClassFromString([self class]));
}

The problem occurs when foo of Class B, calls [super foo]. When [super foo] (i.e. Class A) reaches the NSLog statement, [self class] returns class B, and not A.

Likewise if C called [super foo], the log statement in super would log class C.

What I want to do, is output the class whose method implementation is being executed – so if class B calls [super foo], then the log statement in [A foo] outputs Class A.

The simple way is to replace NSClassFromString with a hardcoded string representing the class name, but I was wondering if there is a better way to do this ?

Answer 1

You can use __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ to include both the class and the method name:

NSLog(@"Greetings from %s", __PRETTY_FUNCTION__);

I don’t believe that there is a compiler-time macro for just the class name.