Question

I’m trying to create a single ‘query’ NSString object that basically looks like this:

query1=myFirstParameter&query2=mySecondParameter&query3=myThirdParameter

ive got strings that look like this:

query1=myFirstParameter
query2=mySecondParameter
  and
query3=myThirdParameter

my question is this: is there an easy way to combine these 3 components by adding a ? character between them considering the number of strings is variable? i.e., a simple string with format is too inflexible for my purposes.

Answer 1

Well, if you have a variable number of strings to concatenate, you can just make them an array and join them by the @"&" string:

NSArray *components = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:query1, query2, query3, nil];
NSString *result = [components componentsJoinedByString:@"&"];

You can even make this into a variadic macro:

#define BUILD_QUERY(...) [[NSArray arrayWithObjects:__VA_ARGS__ , nil]
    componentsJoinedByString:@"&"]