Question

I have a string array as such:

NSArray *names;
names = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:
@"FirstList",
@"SecondList",
@"ThirdList",
  nil];     

I’m trying to assign an element of this string array to a string variable as such:

NSString *fileName = names[0]; // "Incompatible types in initialization"

or with casting

NSString *fileName = (NSString)names[0]; // "Conversion to non-scalar type requested"

I’m trying to do this, so I can use the string in a method that takes a string as an argument, such as:

NSString *plistPath = [bundle pathForResource:filetName ofType:@"plist"];

Is there no way to assign an element of a string array to a string variable?

Update from 2014: The code in this post actually would work these days since special syntactic support has been added to the framework and compiler for indexing NSArrays like names[0]. But at the time this question was asked, it gave the error mentioned in this question.

Answer 1

You don’t use C array notation to access NSArray objects. Use the -objectAtIndex: method for your first example:

NSString *fileName = [names objectAtIndex:0];

The reason for this is that NSArray is not “part of Objective-C”. It’s just a class provided by Cocoa much like any that you could write, and doesn’t get special syntax privileges.