About NSString
The NSString class provides a
more convenient way of working with strings than dealing with traditional C strings. That’s
not to say that you are completely free and clear of C strings (NSStrings are stored as C strings beneath the
covers), but for day-to-day string handling, you will likely stay within
the NSString realm.
One more potential complexity is character encoding, especially if
your app retrieves explicitly encoded text from a server. The NSString class has many methods that convert and
accommodate a wide range of character encodings. If these issues are
important to your coding, you should read the “String Programming Guide
for Cocoa” in the SDK documentation once you have a good working knowledge
of the basics revealed in this chapter.
Regular expression support is available only beginning with iOS 4.
Chapter 9 demonstrates how
to use regular expressions with NSString objects. If your app is designed to
include earlier iOS versions and you want to use regular expressions,
you’ll be out of luck (although some third-party libraries
exist).
As is the case with all basic data classes in Cocoa Touch, once you
create an object, you usually cannot modify its content. That is to say,
you cannot insert or delete segments of the string. All NSString methods that sound on the surface to be
modifying the current object (e.g., the uppercaseString method) actually perform the
modifications and return a new NSString object. You can, of course, assign the new object to ...
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