Question

toNewbie question: Could someone help me understand if the receiver of an initWith…. method take ownership of the returned object and should manage it.
For example:

NSString *msg; //could be used to hold some data, then
[msg initWithFormat: @"some text"]; //do I need to do a retain or is the method returning an auto-released string object

Just trying to get my head wrapped around methods that don’t use alloc explicitly

Answer 1

Methods with init in the name are generally called in conjunction with alloc, as in:

MyObject *obj = [[MyObject alloc] init];

alloc returns an object with a +1 retain count, so you shouldn’t need to retain it.