Question

So far I’ve kept app data on remote servers in the plist format. Downloading and parsing this format is relatively easy:

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.mysite.com/data.plist"];
NSDictionary *plistData = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfURL:url];

How can I download a text file with an arbitrary format using Objective-C?

An example of arbitrary format is a file that’s two sections of CSV data separated by a few blank lines. Of course I’ll know the format ahead of time.

Answer 1

Use -[NSString initWithContentsOfURL:encoding:error:, like so

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.mysite.com/data.plist"];
NSError *error = nil;
NSString *text = [[NSString alloc] initWithContentsOfURL: url
                                                encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding
                                                   error: &error];

This will get you the file’s contents which you can treat however you need to.