Question

I’ve got a NSString *paragraph; which is filled with N number of words. In there I’m guaranteed to have:

…
First Name: David
Last Name: Johnson
…

What I need to do is find David and Johnson out of this string. However I don’t know what the name is ahead of time (David could be John, Chris, etc..)

In C# I’d just find the line starting with First Name: and then separate the words with a ” ” as a delimiter.. But I’m lost on how to do this in Objective-C

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I would use a NSScanner. Like this:

NSString *lastName;
NSString *firstName;
NSString *text = @"Foobar\nFirst Name: David\nLast Name: Johnson\nFoobaz\nBarBaz";

NSScanner *textScanner = [NSScanner scannerWithString:text];

if ([textScanner scanUpToString:@"\nFirst Name: " intoString:NULL]) {
    [textScanner scanString:@"First Name: " intoString:NULL];
    [textScanner scanUpToCharactersFromSet:[NSCharacterSet newlineCharacterSet] intoString:&firstName];
}

// if last name always comes after first name there's no need to do this:
[textScanner setScanLocation:0];

if ([textScanner scanUpToString:@"\nLast Name: " intoString:NULL]) {
    [textScanner scanString:@"Last Name: " intoString:NULL];
    [textScanner scanUpToCharactersFromSet:[NSCharacterSet newlineCharacterSet] intoString:&lastName];
}    

NSLog(@"%@ %@", firstName, lastName);