Introduction to String Programming Guide

String Programming Guide describes how to create, search, concatenate, and draw strings. It also describes character sets, which let you search a string for characters in a group, and scanners, which convert numbers to strings and vice versa.

Who Should Read This Document

You should read this document if you need to work directly with strings or character sets.

Organization of This Document

This document contains the following articles:

• Strings describes the characteristics of string objects in Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.

• Creating and Converting String Objects explains the ways in which NSString and its subclass NSMutableString create string objects and convert their contents to and from the various character encodings they support.

• Formatting String Objects describes how to format NSString objects.

• String Format Specifiers describes printf-style format specifiers supported by NSString.

• Reading Strings From and Writing Strings To Files and URLs describes how to read strings from and write strings to files and URLs.

• Searching, Comparing, and Sorting Strings describes methods for finding characters and substrings within strings and for comparing one string to another.

• Words, Paragraphs, and Line Breaks describes how words, paragraphs, and line breaks are determined.

• Characters and Grapheme Clusters describes how you can break strings down into user-perceived characters.

• Character Sets explains how to use character set objects, and how to use NSCharacterSet methods to create standard and custom character sets.

• Scanners describes NSScanner objects, which interpret and convert the characters of an NSString object into number and string values.

• String Representations of File Paths describes the NSString methods that manipulate strings as file-system paths.

• Drawing Strings discusses the methods of the NSString class that support drawing directly in an NSView object.