Question

I can’t imagine a “clean” or efficient method of doing this.

I would like to transform a string of numbers like @”1234″ into an array of shorts for a calculator pet project*.

I think of getting substrings and then the intValue of the substring but it sounds cumbersome and overkill. Would there be a more elegant way of doing it?

Thanks in advance!

* I know that there are more efficient ways to do maths and plenty of C libraries do this but it’s for my own education :-).

Answer 1

If I have this straight, you want to turn an NSString into a short array? This function assumes each character in the NSString is a separate short. Oh, and don’t forget to free that array when you’re done with it!

//Stephen Melvin <[e-mail]>
short *NSStringToShortArray(NSString *digits){

    int count = [digits length];

    short *shortArray = malloc(sizeof(short)*count);

    for(int i = 0; i<count; i++){
        shortArray[i] = (short)[digits characterAtIndex:i] - '0';
    }

    return shortArray;
}