Question

I’m getting a potentially leaked object error from the Static Analyzer for this line:

strCleanPhone = [[[[strPhone stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@" " withString:@""] 
                           stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"(" withString:@""] 
                          stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@")" withString:@""] 
                         stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"-" withString:@""];

For one, is this the preferred way to strip non-numeric characters from a phone number string?

Two, can you possibly explain why this would be a leaked object?

Answer 1

The strings created by stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString are autoreleased, so they aren’t leaked. If there’s a leak, it has to do with strPhone and strCleanPhone.

For example, if strCleanPhone is a @property with the retain option, and is currently not nil, then your code leaks it. To use the release/retain code that was generated by synthesize you have to use the property syntax: self.strCleanPhone = .... Using just strCleanPhone = ... sets the instance variable and doesn’t release any object it was pointing to.