Question

Is there something similar to regular expressions for objective-c?

I need a simple way to get elements from separated by following set of characters:

"\n"
", "
"; "

Currently I have the following code:

NSMutableArray *translations = [ [NSMutableArray alloc] init];
NSArray *temp_array1 = [ [translationsView text] componentsSeparatedByString:@"\n"];

for (int i = 0; i < [temp_array1 count]; i++)
{
    NSArray *temp_array2 = [ [temp_array1 objectAtIndex: i] componentsSeparatedByString:@", "];
    for (int j = 0; j < [temp_array2 count]; j++)
    {j]);
        [translations addObject: [temp_array2 objectAtIndex: j] ];
    }
}

But I as well want implement support for the “; ” separator. And if I am going to do it the same way I did it before it would become way to complex.

Is there an easier way to achieve this goal?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

I think you will want to look at RegexKit Framework.

RegexKit is an Objective-C framework
for regular expressions:

• Support for Mac OS X Cocoa and GNUstep. Mac OS X 10.4 or later
  required.
• Mac OS X Universal Binary, including 64-bit support on Mac OS X 10.5.
• No sub-classing required. Seamlessly adds regular expression support to all
  NSArray, NSData, NSDictionary, NSSet,
  and NSString Foundation objects with a
  rich set of Objective-C category
  additions.
• Unicode enabled. Full Unicode support for NSString objects.
• Extensive, high quality documentation.
• Full source code with a BSD license.
• Uses the BSD licensed PCRE Perl Compatible Regular Expressions library
  for the regular expression engine.

Tuned for high performance, including
such features as:

• Caches the compiled form of the regular expression for speed.
• Multithreading safe, including multiple reader, single writer
  multithreaded access to the compiled
  regular expression cache.
• Makes minimal use of heap storage (ie, malloc() and free()), instead
  allocating most temporary buffer needs
  dynamically from the stack.
• Uses Core Foundation directly on Mac OS X for additional speed.

Includes support for Mac OS X 10.5
Leopard:

• 64 bit support. Pre-built for ppc, ppc64, i386, and x86_64.
• Garbage Collection enabled. Complete support for Leopards Garbage
  Collection feature.
• Integrated Xcode 3.0 documentation. Get real time API information via the
  Research Assistant.
• Collection of instruments for Instruments.app.
• RegexKit specific DTrace probe points.