Question

I have this text read into an NSString *responce which I am trying to parse into an array.

        total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  30412800 16805888 13606912        0  1581056  4837376
Swap:        0        0        0
MemTotal:        29700 kB
MemFree:         13288 kB
MemShared:           0 kB
Buffers:          1544 kB
Cached:           4724 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:           1197 kB
Inactive:          699 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:        29700 kB
LowFree:         13288 kB
SwapTotal:           0 kB
SwapFree:            0 kB
Dirty:               0 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
Mapped:            277 kB
Slab:              132 kB
CommitLimit:     14848 kB
Committed_AS:     3400 kB
PageTables:       1567 kB
VmallocTotal:  1048404 kB
VmallocUsed:     17208 kB
VmallocChunk:  1031168 kB

If I read into an array like this, I get over 300 objects in the array!

NSMutableArray *items2 = [NSMutableArray arrayWithArray:[responce componentsSeparatedByString:@" "]];
NSLog(@"count of memory array = %i",[items2 count]);

I add this to try and remove all the blank ones, but still end up with 170.

for (int i=0; i<[items2 count]; i++) {
            NSString *str = [items2 objectAtIndex:i];
            if([str length]==0 || !str || str==nil) {
                [items2 removeObjectAtIndex:i];
            }
        }

This NSLog statement tells me that most of them are zero length, why where they not removed?

for (int i=0; i<[items2 count]; i++) {
            NSLog(@"%i=%@ / length=%d",i,[items2 objectAtIndex:i],[[items2 objectAtIndex:i] length]);
        }

Answer 1

It looks like what you really want is a NSDictionary + NSScanner:

NSDictionary *scanString(NSString *str)
{
    NSScanner *scanner = [NSScanner scannerWithString:str];
    NSMutableDictionary *results = [NSMutableDictionary dictionary];

    // read away the first three lines (headers, mem, and swap). If you need this data, parse it here.
    for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
        [scanner scanUpToString:@"\n" intoString:NULL];
    }

    NSString *line = nil;
    while ([scanner scanUpToString:@"\n" intoString:&line]) {
        // trim the line
        line = [line stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]];

        // read up to the ':'
        int loc = [line rangeOfString:@":"].location;
        NSString *key = [line substringToIndex:loc];

        // read the value associated with the key
        NSString *value = [[line substringFromIndex:loc + 1] stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]];
        value = [value substringToIndex:[value rangeOfString:@" "].location];

        [results setObject:value forKey:key];
    }

    return results;
}

This puts it in a dictionary that you can access by using the following:

NSDictionary *parsed = scanString(response);
NSLog(@"Active Memory: %@", [parsed objectForKey:@"Active"]);