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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-06T15:30:39+00:00

I am sorting and sectioning a tableview using the first letter of an array

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I am sorting and sectioning a tableview using the first letter of an array of strings, just like the Contacts app does. I’m using Core Data and NSFetchedResultsController to drive the tableview. I use the first letter of the word, and if the letter isn’t Only issue is, when I use a sort description with localizedCaseInsensitiveCompare:, it seems to generate the list of sections with: ‘#’, ‘A’, ‘B’ … ‘Z’. I want the # to come at the end of the list, not the first (just like the Contacts app, again). Is there any creative way I could accomplish this?

Here’s how I’m creating the NSFetchedResultsController:

NSFetchRequest *fetchRequest = [[NSFetchRequest alloc] init];

NSEntityDescription *entity = [NSEntityDescription entityForName:@"Person" inManagedObjectContext:self.managedObjectContext];
[fetchRequest setEntity:entity];
[fetchRequest setFetchBatchSize:100];

NSSortDescriptor *sortDescriptorLetter = [[NSSortDescriptor alloc] initWithKey:@"sectionLetter" ascending:YES selector:@selector(localizedCaseInsensitiveCompare:)];
NSArray *sortDescriptors = [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects:sortDescriptorLetter, nil];
[fetchRequest setSortDescriptors:sortDescriptors];

NSFetchedResultsController *aFetchedResultsController = [[NSFetchedResultsController alloc] initWithFetchRequest:fetchRequest managedObjectContext:self.managedObjectContext sectionNameKeyPath:@"sectionLetter" cacheName: nil]; // NOTE: set the cache name to nil for testing ...

aFetchedResultsController.delegate = self;
self.fetchedResultsController = aFetchedResultsController;

 NSError *error = nil;
 if (![self.fetchedResultsController performFetch:&error])
 ...
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Apparently you can’t customize sort descriptors when using the NSFetchedResultsController. You have to go with the standard sorting selectors, like “localizedCaseInsensitiveCompare”.

    The way I ended up doing this is to take the NSFetchedResultsController results and tweaking the boilerplate code for setting up the tableView with my own mapping of indexPaths, where I off-set the 0th section to the last section of the table. It’s a bit of work, and it might just be better to forget using NSFetchedResultsController and load all the objects directly.

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