Question

I am trying to build an iPhone App, where I read an RSS feed and have to parse out the id of an article from the URL.
The links provided by the RSS feed are like the following:
http://example.com/variable/path/components/352343/index.html

I need 352343.

So basically I need to search for at least one digit between slashes (path components could also contain digits). Regexp would be easy: “//(\d+)//”. But how can I do it with NSScanner?

Thanks,
Ernesto

Answer 1

You can split your url string into parts separated by “/” and check if any part is a valid integer.

NSArray* components = [urlString componentsSeparatedByString:@"/"];
int myId;
for (NSString *comp in components){
   NSScanner *scanner = [NSScanner scannerWithString:comp];
   if ([scanner scanInt: &myId])
       return myId; 
}

or you can simply use NSString method:

int myId;
for (NSString *comp in components)
   if (myId = [comp intValue]) // intValue returns 0 if comp is not an integer
      return myId;