Question

I am trying to format an array of numbers to display in an array of CCLabelTTFs in a loop. NSNumberFormatter returns an autorelease object. I am not quite sure how I should be handling the memory management here. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Here is the problem I’m trying to figure out:

NSNumberFormatter *formatter = [[NSNumberFormatter alloc] init];
NSString *tempString;

for(int i = 0; i<10; i++){
    tempString = [formatter stringFromNumber:[NSNumber numberWithInteger:NumberArray[i]]];
    CCLabelTTFArray[i] = [[CCLabelTTF alloc] initWithString: tempString fontName:@"Arial" fontSize:10.0f];
    [tempString release];
}

[formatter release];

Answer 1

You do not need to call [tempString release];: the run loop will “autorelease” the objects for you some time after your method completes. With short-running loops (such as yours, that have only ten iterations) there is nothing else to worry about. For loops with thousands of iterations, you may consider adding an Autorelease Pool.

I thought it might be causing a memory leak since a the end of the function it will autorelease tempString but not all of the previous allocations of tempString

Each invocation of the stringFromNumber: method adds its return value to autorelease pool, so no matter how many times you loop executes, all returned strings will be autoreleased.