Creating an array from a text file read from a URL

Question

I am reading a text file from a URL and want to parse the contents of the file into an array. Below is a snippet of the code I am using. I want to be able to place each line of the text into the next row of the array. Is there a way to identify the carriage return/line feed during or after the text has been retrieved?

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:kTextURL];
textView.text = [NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:url encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding                        error:nil];

Drew C · Accepted Answer · 2010-12-01 02:07:57Z

9

When separating by newline characters it's best to use the following procedure:

NSCharacterSet *newlines = [NSCharacterSet newlineCharacterSet];
NSArray *lineComponents = [textFile componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:newlines];

This ensures that you get lines separated by either CR, CR+LF, or NEL.

answered Dec 1, 2010 at 2:07

Drew C

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2 Comments

Jacob Relkin Over a year ago

Wow, I never knew that. Nice! +1

Dave DeLong Over a year ago

This is good, but it will interpret CRLF as two different line endings, so you'll be left with an empty element in the array for each CRLF.

Jacob Relkin · Accepted Answer · 2010-12-01 00:32:43Z

3

You can use NSString's -componentsSeparatedByString: method, which will return to you an NSArray:

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:kTextURL];
NSString *response = [NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:url encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
textView.text = response;
NSArray *lines = [response componentsSeparatedByString:@"\n"];

//iterate through the lines...
for(NSString *line in lines) {
   //do something with line...
}

edited Dec 1, 2010 at 0:32

answered Dec 1, 2010 at 0:27

Jacob Relkin

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3 Comments

Rog Over a year ago

If it's a line feed/carriage return, you can try componentsSeparatedByString:@"\n"

draion Over a year ago

'componentSeparatedByCharactersInSet' actually created an index with the '\r\n'. So I replaced it with the following change:

draion Over a year ago

NSArray *lines = [response componentsSeparatedByString:@"\r\n"];

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