Question

I’m writing my first iPhone app and, apologies, if this is the wrong forum for my question. I have a .csv/.xls file that I need to import into and Contacts like app with an index. How can this be done faster than entering it in all by hand?

If I am asking in the wrong forum, please help point me in the right direction.

Many thanks!

Answer 1

If you provide more information, I can give you more help.

You can use Core Data to store your information. First, you need to model your data (look for WWDC training videos for Core Data). Then you will need to create a backing store for storing the data. You can write a program to parse the data and insert them into your database/object graph.

If you are new to Core Data, I’d recommend that you pick up a good book on Core Data before you start. If you are already familiar with Core Data, then write yourself a program to read your file and insert them into a backing store.

If you save your xls as a tab separated (tsv) file, the parser to read the file will be quite trivial. Just look for \t as you read each line of your file to determine the beginning of each column while reading one line at a time.

If you save your data as csv, then your parser will need to deal with comas that occur in the middle of a string. This is considerably more difficult program to get right. However, if you search for algorithms for importing csv, you should be able to see quite a bit out there.