How to truncate NSString? - iphone

Question

I looked at the string formatting documents but couldn't figure out exactly how to do this.
Lets say I have a sting like this
#"(01–05) Operations on the nervous system"
I want to create 2 strings from this like so:
#"01-05" and #"Operations on the nervous system"
How can I do this?
Here are the docs I looked at: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Strings/Articles/FormatStrings.html

Answer 1

Give this a shot. It might be off a bit, I havent checked for typos. But you can mess around with it now that you get the idea.
NSString * sourceString = #"(01–05) Operations on the nervous system";
NSString *string1 = [sourceString substringToIndex:6];
string1 = [string1 stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:#"(" withString:#""];
//string1 = 01-05
NSString *string2 =[sourceString substringFromIndex:7];
//string2 = Operations on the nervous system

Answer 2

If you just want the first substring contained by the characters "(" and ")" and anything after that I'd recommend doing something like this:
NSString *original = #"(01–05) Operations on the nervous system";
NSString *firstPart = [NSString string];
NSString *secondPart = [NSString string];
NSScanner *scanner = [NSScanner scannerWithString:original];
[scanner scanUpToString:#"(" intoString:NULL]; // find first "("
if (![scanner isAtEnd]) {
[scanner scanString:#"(" intoString:NULL]; // consume "("
[scanner scanUpToString:#")" intoString:&firstPart]; // store characters up to the next ")"
if (![scanner isAtEnd]) {
[scanner scanString:#")" intoString:NULL]; // consume ")"
// grab the rest of the string
secondPart = [[scanner string] substringFromIndex:[scanner scanLocation]];
}
}
Of course the secondPart string will still have spaces and whatnot at the front of it, to get rid of those you can do something along the lines of:
secondPart = [secondPart stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceCharacterSet];
The advantage of using NSScanner is that you don't have to hard-code the start and end of the firstPart substring.

Answer 3

NSString *theFirstStringSubString = [NSString substringFromIndex:1];
NSString *theFirstStringSecondSubstring = [theFirstStringSubString substringToIndex:6];
Now theFirstStringSecondSubstring is 01-05
same thing for the other but at different indexes. Please note that these are strings that are autoreleased. If you want to keep them, retain it.