Question

I have some text loaded into NSString objects which contains annotations in square brackets – I need to strip the square brackets and everything within them so the user is only presented with the body text.

However, because of the reliance of Objective-C on square brackets for messaging etc…, I’m having a bit of a problem removing them.

Is there some special escape character for using square brackets (for example as an argument to ‘rangeOfString:’)? Xcode repeatedly informs me that there isn’t.

Cheers

Answer 1

You can use regular expressions to remove substrings you want:

NSString *s = @"hi[bla]tototo[lalA123]a";
NSString *result = [s stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"\\[[\\w]+\\]" 
                                                withString:@""
                                                   options:NSRegularExpressionSearch|NSCaseInsensitiveSearch
                                                     range:NSMakeRange(0, [s length])];
NSLog(@"%@", result);
// output "hitototoa"

P.S. You may need to adjust regexp pattern if your annotations may contain characters that not match ‘\w’ specifier