Question

I want to be able to use NSString, or something similar to store an array of strings, but access them by a key (I think this is what it’s called), instead of a numeric index.

For example, instead of doing this:

return names[3];

Do something like this:

return names["Bob"];

How do you store and retrieve values like this?

Please excuse my lack of knowledge of this. I’ve been working with Objective C for about a year now, but never had to do anything like this.

Answer 1

In Objective-C, you do this with the NSDictionary class and its mutable subclass NSMutableDictionary. You can get the value for a key using

NSString *value = [myDictionary objectForKey:@"Bob"];