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Introduction to Strings Programming Guide for Cocoa

Contents:

Who Should Read This Document
Organization of This Document
See Also

Strings Programming Guide for Cocoa 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.

• “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.

• “Paragraphs and Line Breaks” describes how paragraphs and line breaks are represented.

• “Characters and 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.

See Also

For more information, refer to the following documents:

• Attributed Strings Programming Guide is closely related to Strings Programming Guide for Cocoa. It provides information about NSAttributedString objects, which manage sets of attributes, such as font and kerning, that are associated with character strings or individual characters.

• Data Formatting Programming Guide for Cocoa describes how to format data using objects that create, interpret, and validate text.

• Internationalization Programming Topics provides information about localizing strings in your project, including information on how string formatting arguments can be ordered.

• Strings Programming Guide for Core Foundation in Core Foundation, discusses the Core Foundation opaque type CFString, which is toll-free bridged with the NSString class.

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