Question

I am reading a *.srt subtitle file into a NSString. The content of this string looks like this:

1
00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:24,400
Altocumulus clouds occur between six thousand

2
00:00:24,600 --> 00:00:27,800
and twenty thousand feet above ground level.

I am looking for an elegant solution to split this string into an NSArray in which each element contains the information which is related to one particular subtitle-“frame”, e.g. the zeroth element would look like this:

1
00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:24,400
Altocumulus clouds occur between six thousand

Any ideas how to accomplish this task in an elegant manner? I tried splitting the original string using the method

[string componentsSeparatedByString:@"\n\n"];

but this method fails to detect the blank lines..

Thanks for your help!

tobi

Answer 1

If [string componentsSeparatedByString:@"\n\n"] doesn’t work, then there are two possibilities:

1. Your file contains MSDOS-style line breaks, which are \r\n. So try splitting on @"\r\n\r\n".

2. Your supposedly blank lines contain spaces or tabs. You can check this from the shell using cat -e.