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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-02T07:52:58+00:00

I’m working on a translator that will take English language text (as user input

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I’m working on a translator that will take English language text (as user input into a UITextView) and (with a button press) replace specific words with alternatives. I have both the English words in scope plus their alternatives in separate Arrays (englishArray and alternativeArray), indexed correspondingly.

My challenge is finding an algorithm that will allow me to identify a word in the input text (a UITextView) ignoring characters like <“,.()>, lookup the word in englishArray (case insensitive), locate the corresponding word in alternativeArray and then use that word in place of the original – writing it back to the UITextView.

Any help greatly appreciated.

NB. I have created a Category extending the NSArray functionality with a indexOfCaseInsensitiveString method that ignores case when doing an indexOfObject type lookup if that helps.

Tony.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I think that using an NSScanner would be best to parse the string into separate words which you could then pass to your indexOfCaseInsensitiveString method. scanCharactersFromSet:intoString: using a set of all the characters you want to ignore, including whitespace and newline characters should get you to the start of a word, and then you could use scanUpToCharactersFromSet:intoString: using the same set to scan to the end of the word. Using scanLocation at the beginning and end of each scan should allow you to get the range of that word, so if you find a match in your array, you will know where in your string to make the replacement.

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