Question

The goal is to have an array where all strings are of length n.

So at the moment what I have my code doing is reading in a plist (which is just 250,000 strings) into an array, and then iterating over the array in order to find which ones are/aren’t of length n. Of course, for the sake of efficiency, I’d prefer being able to read in from the plist STRING BY STRING so, as I’m reading in, I may the length then before inserting into the array. I’m just starting to learn objective-c, but I was struggling to Google around for a solution =P

EDIT: Well I just found out I can find much more documentation typing property list rather than plist into google 🙂 so I may be able to figure this out myself

Answer 1

You can parse plist into tree (NSMutableDictionary). Dict will have keys with name of string length.

for example

NSMutableDictionary *result = [NSMutableDictionary dictionary];

for (NSString *str in [plistDict allObjects]) {

    NSString *key = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d", [str length]];

    NSMutableArray *array = [result objectForKey:key];
    if (!array) {
        array = [NSMutableArray array];
    }
    [array addObject:str];
    [result setObject:array forKey:key];
}

than you can access array with needed strings length

NSArray *string4Lenght = [result objectForKey:@"4"];