Question

I am using Objective-C and I am trying to set an equation that is stored in an NSString to be evaluated and stored in an NSInteger.

something similar to the following:

equation = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:@"1+5*6"];

and then evaluate that to become 31 and store it into an NSInteger. any ideas how to do this?

Answer 1

You want the wonderful, amazing, and fabulous GCMathParser, available (FOR FREE!) on apptree.net: http://apptree.net/parser.htm It does exactly what you’re asking, and even allows you to do variable substitutions (3x+42, evaluate with x = 7). It even has support for mathematical functions like sin(), cos(), tan(), their inverses, dtor(), log(), ….

edit a long time later…

While GCMathParser is pretty awesome, it has the flaw of not being extensible. So if you need a function that it doesn’t natively support, then too bad. So I decided to do something about it, and came up with an entirely native math parser and evaluator: http://github.com/davedelong/DDMathParser