Question

Somewhere in an ARC project, I have:

//Class1.h
@interface Class1 {
    NSDictionary * dict;
}

@end

//Class1.m
@implementation Class1

-(void)loadDict {
    NSDictionary * dict = [[NSDictionary alloc] init];
    // Now load couple of (NSString *, NSString *) pairs into the dictionary
    ...
}

-(void)releaseAllMemoryUsedByDict {
    //TODO
}

@end

How do I release all the memory occupied by dict, on demand? I guess if I had an NSMutableDictionary, I could call its removeAllObjects method. How would I do it for NSDictionary? Would setting dict = NULL work?

Answer 1

Setting it to nil will work, assuming that no other object is holding on to (has strong reference to) the NSDictionary.