Question

I would like to figure out the NSPredicate that will search my Core data for words that begins with:

For example:
description field in the core data has text like this:

My name is Mike
My name is Moe
My name is Peter
My name is George

If I search ‘My name is’ I need to get the 3 lines
If I search ‘My name is M’ I need to get the first 2 lines

I tried the code below, but can’t get what I need. My guess I need a regular expression, but not sure how to do it.

[NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"desc beginswith [cd] %@",word];

Answer 1

I did it this way recently and worked fine. Try it out. I see I don’t have [cd] and beginswith but contains. You could give it a try.

NSPredicate *predicate = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"SELF contains %@", textField.text];
NSArray *list = [allWords filteredArrayUsingPredicate:predicate];

for(NSString *word in list){
    NSLog(@"%@",word);
}

After reading the comments on the starting post:

First of all, you should split up the words in the string from the textfield:

NSArray *myWords = [textField.text componentsSeparatedByString:@" "];

Then doing the same like you first would:

for(NSString *wordFromTextField in myWords){
    NSPredicate *predicate = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"SELF contains %@", wordFromTextField];
    NSArray *list = [allWords filteredArrayUsingPredicate:predicate];

    for(NSString *word in list){
        NSLog(@"%@",word);
    }
}

Instead of NSLogging the words you could add them to an array of course.