Question

When trying to append to an NSMutableString with appendFormat – It adds spaces.

NSM is just an NSMutableString, att_1_variable & att_2_variable is NSString

[NSM appendFormat:@"<tagname att_1=\" %@ \" att_2=\" %@ \">", att_1_variable, att_2_variable];

The result is:

<tagname myattribute="  ContentOfVariable  " title=" ContentOfVariable  ">

Before passing in the strings I am doing:

    NSString* att_1_variable = [att_1_variable_orginal stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:
                  [NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]];

Is there any way around this?

Thanks
Regards
Christian

Answer 1

You’re adding the spaces yourself, by including them in the format string. In C the escape sequence for a quotation mark is just \", with no trailing (or leading) space. So you want:

[NSM appendFormat:@"<tagname myattribute=\"%@\" title=\"%@\">", 
                                 attributeVariable, titleVariable];

If there are spaces between the quotation marks and the variable contents after that then your input variables are padded with spaces. You can trim those with something like:

NSString *trimmedAttributeVariable = [attributeVariable
        stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceCharacterSet]];

...

[NSM appendFormat:@"<tagname myattribute=\"%@\" title=\"%@\">", 
                                 trimmedAttributeVariable, ...

Which will trim spaces and tabs from both ends.