Question

This is more a open question than an error-related question, so if you don’t like to answer these kinds of questions, please don’t flame.

I have a huge (!) list of ships in a .csv file, separated by ,

The matrix is organised like this:

repeated with different data about 500 times.

Now, I want this to be read into objects, which can be used further to populate a UITableView
Currently, I hard-code data into the object files, like this

arrayWithObjectsForTableView = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];
if ([boatsFromOwner isEqualToString:@"Owner1"]) {
    cargoShips* ship = [[cargoShips alloc]init];
    ship.name = @"name1";
    ship.size = 1000;
    ship.owner = @"Owner1";

    [self.boatsForOwner addObject:ship];

    ship = [[cargoShips alloc]init];
    ship.name = @"Name 2";
    ship.size = 2000;
    ship.owner = @"Owner2";

And so on and on with if-else’s. This is a bad method, as
1) Its boring and takes a long time
2) It takes even more time if I want to update the information.
So, I figured it would be smarter to read programmatically from the matrix instead of doing it myself. Yeah, captain obvious came for a visit to my brain.

So, to the question!
How can I read the .csv file that looks like this:

add the ships of, say, owner, to a NSMutableArray, in the shape of objects. (So they can be used to feed my UITableView with ships.

I would also like to have the option to sort by different stuff, like Country of build, Operator etc. How can I make code that feeds relevant ships read from the .csv into objects?
I don’t know much programming, so in-depth answers would be very appreciated.

Answer 1

The depth of your processing will determine what sort of data structure is required for this task. This is the method I would use:

1: Read the .csv file into one giant NSString object:

NSString *file = [[NSString alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:yourCSVHere];

2: Get the individual lines:

NSArray *allLines = [file componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet newlineCharacterSet]];

3: For each line, get the individual components:

for (NSString* line in allLines) {
    NSArray *elements = [line componentsSeparatedByString:@","];
    // Elements now contains all the data from 1 csv line
    // Use data from line (see step 4)
}

4: This is where it’s up to you. My first thought would be to create a class to store all your data. For example:

@interface Record : NSObject
//...
@property (nonatomic, copy) NSString *name
@property (nonatomic, copy) NSString *owner
// ... etc
@end

4a: Then, back in step 3 create a Record object for each line and then put all the Record objects into a separate NSArray (something with larger scope!).

5: Use your NSArray that contains all your Record objects as the data source for your UITableView.

The implementation of Steps 4 and 5 are up to you. That’s probably how I would do it though for a medium sized .csv file.

EDIT: Here’s how to generate the Records.

//
NSMutableArray *someArrayWithLargerScope = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];
//

NSString *file = [[NSString alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:yourCSVHere];
NSArray *allLines = [file componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet newlineCharacterSet];

for (NSString* line in allLines) {
    NSArray *elements = [line componentsSeparatedByString@","];
    Record *rec = [[Record alloc] init];
    rec.name = [elements objectAtIndex:0];
    rec.owner = [elements objectAtIndex:1];
    // And so on for each value in the line.
    // Note your indexes (0, 1, ...) will be determined by the
    // order of the values in the .csv file.
    // ...
    // You'll need one `Record` property for each value.

    // Store the result somewhere
    [someArrayWithLargerScope addObject:rec];
}