Question

I have a simple object. It has several NSString properties (propertyA, propertyB, propertyC).

I have a string (read from a csv file) in the following form:

this is value A, this is value B, this is value C
another row A, another row B

Notice that the second row is missing the last property.

I want to parse the string into my object. Currently I’m grabbing a line from the csv file and then doing this:

MyObject *something = [[MyObject alloc] init];
NSArray *split = [line componentsSeparatedByString:@","];

if (something.count > 0)
    something.propertyA = [split objectAtIndex:0];

if (something.count > 1) 
    something.propertyB = [split objectAtIndex:1];

if (something.count > 2)
    something.propertyC = [split objectAtIndex:2];

This works well, but feels really horrible and hacky!
Has anyone got any suggestions for how I can improve the code?

Answer 1

Take a look at this tread about parsing CSV Where can I find a CSV to NSArray parser for Objective-C?

Dave DeLong wrote a CSV-parser library, you can find it here: https://github.com/davedelong/CHCSVParser

Hope this helps 🙂