Question

Is there a way to loop through all properties in an object and get their “name” and “value”.

I am trying to write a category to serialize objects to a string, based on their property name and values. I’m trying to prevent writing encoding methods for each class, and instead write a generic one.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

You can use this code to enumerate all properties declared in a class, and all attributes of the properties. I guess you’re more interested in parsing the type attribute. They are detailed here.

unsigned int numOfProperties;
objc_property_t *properties = class_copyPropertyList([self class], &numOfProperties);
for ( unsigned int pi = 0; pi < numOfProperties; pi++ ) {
    // Examine the property attributes
    unsigned int numOfAttributes;
    objc_property_attribute_t *propertyAttributes = property_copyAttributeList(properties[pi], &numOfAttributes);
    for ( unsigned int ai = 0; ai < numOfAttributes; ai++ ) {
        switch (propertyAttributes[ai].name[0]) {
            case 'T': // type
                break;
            case 'R': // readonly
                break;
            case 'C': // copy 
                break;
            case '&': // retain
                break;
            case 'N': // nonatomic 
                break;
            case 'G': // custom getter
                break;
            case 'S': // custom setter
                break;
            case 'D': // dynamic 
                break;
            default: 
                break;
        }
    }
    free(propertyAttributes);
}
free(properties);