Question

I know how to handle this when changing stringWithCString in SQLite… you just stringWithUTF8String instead. Is this the same with a char * when it is returned by sysctlbyname? (see code below)

- (NSString *) platform{
    size_t size;
    sysctlbyname("hw.machine", NULL, &size, NULL, 0);
    char *machine = malloc(size);
    sysctlbyname("hw.machine", machine, &size, NULL, 0);
    NSString *platform = [NSString stringWithCString:machine];
    free(machine);
    return platform;
}

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If the C string you’re using is UTF-8-encoded, then use stringWithUTF8String:. If it’s plain ASCII, then use stringWithCString:encoding: with an encoding of NSASCIIStringEncoding. Otherwise, it’s probably encoded using Latin-1, in which case you should use stringWithCString:encoding: with an encoding of NSISOLatin1StringEncoding.

In this case, sysctlbyname is almost certainly going to give you back an ASCII string, so you should do this:

NSString *platform = [NSString stringWithCString:machine encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];

Though using either of the other two methods will do you no harm.