Question

I need to replace the standard upper double quotes “” that already exist (in text I get from a database) with specific quotes for german text for use in a UIWebView.
The first double quote character before the quoted word(s) (every even index) needs to be replaced with the HTML equivalent of „ which is „ and the second one after the quoted word(s) (every odd index) with “ which is “. The quotes can be anywhere in the text, so I can’t rely on any fixed positions.

So basically I have a NSString like this:

just “some” text with some “more” text

or in Objective-C:

NSString *str = @"just \"some\" text with some \"more\" text";

I am aware of the stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString method from NSString, but of course this only replaces all double quotes with the bottom double quote mark.

NSString *newStr = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"\"" withString:@"„"];

I couldn’t find a way to just replace every second or every n-th occurrence, does someone have a hint/idea how I could accomplish that?

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

NSScanner offers another option…

NSScanner *scanner = [NSScanner scannerWithString:englishString];
NSMutableString *germanString = [NSMutableString string];
BOOL foundQuote = YES;
int quoteIndex = 0;

while (foundQuote) {
    NSString *nextPart = @"";
    [scanner scanUpToString:@"\"" intoString:&nextPart];
    if (nextPart != nil) {
        [germanString appendString:nextPart];
    }
    foundQuote = [scanner scanString:@"\"" intoString:nil];
    if (foundQuote) {
        [germanString appendString:((quoteIndex % 2) ? @"“" : @"„")];
        quoteIndex++;
    }
}

NSLog(@"The German version is: %@", germanString);