Question

I have several NSStrings with a format similar to the one below:

"Hello, how       are   you?"

How can I break the string into an array of words? For example, for the above sentence I would expect an array consisting of "Hello,", "how", "are", "you?"

Usually I would break the string into words by using the function [NSString componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet: NSCharacterSet set]

However this won’t work in this situation because the spaces between the words are of unequal length. Note I will not be aware of the size of each word and the space between them.

How can I accomplish this? I am working on an app for OSX not iOS.

EDIT: My eventual goal is to retrieve the second word in the sentence. If there is a easier way to do this without breaking the string into an array please feel free to suggest it.

Answer 1

Try this:

NSMutableArray *parts = [NSMutableArray arrayWithArray:[str componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet  whitespaceCharacterSet]]];
[parts removeObjectIdenticalTo:@""];
NSString *res = [parts objectAtIndex:1]; // The second string