Question

I have text file with 5 strings. I need to use NSURLConnection to get contnent of this file. But NSLog shows me, that ‘dump’ is empty. How can I transform the data from NSMutableData to NSArray. Arrays is because I need to show those 5 items in a TableView.

NSURLRequest *theRequest=[NSURLRequest
                         requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://dl.dropbox.com/u/25105800/names.txt"]
                         cachePolicy:NSURLRequestUseProtocolCachePolicy
                         timeoutInterval:60.0];

NSURLConnection *theConnection=[[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:theRequest delegate:self];
if (theConnection) {
    receivedData = [NSMutableData data];
    NSString *dump = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:receivedData
                         encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
    NSLog(@"data: %@", dump);
    NSArray *outputArray=[dump componentsSeparatedByString:@"\n"];
    self.namesArray = outputArray;

Thanks in advance. BTW URL works, you can see the file.

Answer 1

If you don’t want to use a delegate, you can use a synchronous call with NSURLConnection, like this:

NSURLRequest *theRequest=[NSURLRequest
                     requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://dl.dropbox.com/u/25105800/names.txt"]
                     cachePolicy:NSURLRequestUseProtocolCachePolicy
                     timeoutInterval:60.0];

NSError *error = nil;
NSHTTPURLResponse *response = nil;
NSData *receivedData = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:theRequest response:&response error:&error];

if (error == nil) {
    NSString *dump = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:receivedData
                     encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
    NSLog(@"data: %@", dump);
    NSArray *outputArray=[dump componentsSeparatedByString:@"\n"];
    self.namesArray = outputArray;
}

Just beware that this will not be running asynchronously. If you don’t want it to run on the main thread and block your main thread/UI, consider using a separate thread to execute that code or use GCD.