Question

What would be a convenient way to store text files, such that it would make it easy to create objects from them in iOS?

For example:

• spreadsheets -> XML -> NSObject subclass (the problem with this one is that Google Docs Spreadsheets can only be exported to OpenDocument Spreadsheets XML files, which are very inconvenient to parse)
• csv -> NSObject subclass (csv is too error-prone)

Sample data to be stored:

• Name – Number – Email
• Alice – 012345 – [e-mail]
• Bob – 78910 – [e-mail]

Sample class to be created:

@interface Person : NSObject
{
    NSString *name;
    NSString *number;
    NSString *email;
}

Thank you

Answer 1

Assuming you only have plaintext data here’s what I would do:

1. Export spreadsheet to CSV.
2. Read CSV in python using CSV module.
3. Convert to an XML of your liking using minidom module.
4. Read the XML in Obj C. I used SMXML for this (https://github.com/nfarina/xmldocument/). Not very fast but quite convenient.

This process can also be automated using AppleScript.