Question

The code works and populates the table with sections, but it has a flaw: It doesn’t escape punctuation and ‘The’ prefixes in song titles, just like how the native music app does.

Would really appreciate some guidance on how I should go about doing this.

- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];
    MPMediaQuery *songQuery = [MPMediaQuery songsQuery];
    self.songsArray = [songQuery items];
    self.sectionedSongsArray = [self partitionObjects:self.songsArray collationStringSelector:@selector(title)];
}

- (NSArray *)partitionObjects:(NSArray *)array collationStringSelector:(SEL)selector
{
    UILocalizedIndexedCollation *collation = [UILocalizedIndexedCollation currentCollation];
    NSInteger sectionCount = [[collation sectionTitles] count];
    NSMutableArray *unsortedSections = [NSMutableArray arrayWithCapacity:sectionCount];
    for(int i = 0; i < sectionCount; i++)
    {
        [unsortedSections addObject:[NSMutableArray array]];
    }
    for (id object in array)
    {
        NSInteger index = [collation sectionForObject:object collationStringSelector:selector];
        [[unsortedSections objectAtIndex:index] addObject:object];
    }
    NSMutableArray *sections = [NSMutableArray arrayWithCapacity:sectionCount];
    for (NSMutableArray *section in unsortedSections)
    {
        [sections addObject:[collation sortedArrayFromArray:section collationStringSelector:selector]];
    }
    return sections;
}

Answer 1

I completely overlooked this. The answer here is to simply use MPMediaQuerySection. The Apple docs are there for a reason!