Saving Arrays in Swift - serialization

Question

I have a question about saving Arrays in Apple's new programming language Swift. In Objective-C I saved data with NSFileManager... but this doesn't work anymore in Swift. So I wanted to ask how I should save an array WITHOUT using NSUserDefaults which isn't really suited for storing a big amount of data. I would really much appreciate any help :]

Answer 1

First (if your array is not of string type) change it to String:
var notStringArray = [1, 2, 3, 4]
var array: [String] = []
for value in notStringArray{
array.append(String(value))
}
Then reduce the array to one string:
var array = ["1", "2", "3", "4", "5"] //Ignore this line if your array wasn't of type String and you did the step above
var stringFromArray = reduce(array, "") { $0.isEmpty ? $1 : "\($0)\n\($1)" }
This create an string that looks like this:
"1
2
3
4
5"
And then to write and read a file add this class at the top of your file:
class File {
class func open (path: String, utf8: NSStringEncoding = NSUTF8StringEncoding) -> String? {
var error: NSError? //
return NSFileManager().fileExistsAtPath(path) ? String(contentsOfFile: path, encoding: utf8, error: &error)! : nil
}
class func save (path: String, fileContent: String, utf8: NSStringEncoding = NSUTF8StringEncoding) -> Bool {
var error: NSError? //
return fileContent.writeToFile(path, atomically: true, encoding: utf8, error: &error)
}
}
(Don't forget to import UIKit)
To save to a file:
let didSave = File.save("DirectoryOfFile", content: stringFromArray)
if didSave {
println("file saved")
} else {
println("error saving file")
}
To get it back:
var stringFromFile = ""
if let loadData = File.open("DirectoryOfFile") {
stringFromFile = loadData
} else {
println("error reading file")
}
To put it back in an array:
var newArray: [String] = [] //Creates empty string array
newArray = stringFromFile.componentsSeparatedByString("\n")
And there you have it