Dev Blog

Ugh, so on my way to making awesome Apps, I feel like I need to “upgrade” the basic libraries the iOS SDK comes with. Today was one of those instances.

I needed to upgrade their String class NSString so that it could replace keys in it’s string with values from a NSDictionary. The following is the very simple result using a Category.

@interface NSString (NSString_SFKeys)

- (NSString*) stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfKeysWithValues:(NSDictionary*)keyValuePairs;

@end


@implementation NSString (NSString_SFKeys)
- (NSString*) stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfKeysWithValues:(NSDictionary*)keyValuePairs
{

NSString *fStr = self;
if (keyValuePairs) {

for (NSString *key in [keyValuePairs allKeys]) {

NSString *value = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@",[keyValuePairs valueForKey:key]];
fStr = [fStr stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:key withString:value];

}

}
return fStr;

}

@end

And that’s that. Works great! Now I can do stuff like add story text like the following:

It was a dark and stormy night. {Player} looked out {pospronoun} window at a blackened sky.

And have it print:

It was a dark and stormy night. Jimmy looked out his window at a blackened sky.

Yay for smartness!