Question

I’m working with an API that returns a JSON dictionary. One of the keys is “Variant Hash”, and the corresponding data is an integer like this: -7331108254952843887 or 6209894088655053576. I’m assuming this is a long long value. I’m serializing this data with NSCoder, and I’m not sure which encodeValue: method to use. There is no encodeLongLongValue:forKey:.

Also, doing NSLog(@"%@",returnedDictionary); displays the entire dictionary structure, but using objectForKey: doesn’t work because the corresponding value for the key Variant Hash is not an object.

How can I get the data out of the dictionary, and how should I store this with NSCoder?

Answer 1

Depending on the JSON parser you’re using, the number is being stored in the dictionary as an NSNumber, NSDecimalNumber, NSString, or NSValue. NSNumber (or NSDecimalNumber, which is a subclass) is probably the most likely, but I’d check your parser’s documentation or code.

Assuming that’s the case, you’d get the value as such.

NSNumber *numberValue = [myDictionary objectForKey:myKey];
long long longValue = [numberValue longLongValue];

I’d probably implement some type checking in this code, just to be safe.

NSNumber conforms to NSCoding, so you can use the numberValue instance to also do your encoding.