Correct way to find out all the superclasses of a Class in Objective-C? - objective-c

Question

I'm a novice, and I seem to be getting multiple errors on this.
All I want is a for or while loop to print out all the superclasses of a certain Class.
Here is the pseudocode of what I want:
IDontKnowWhatClass *superClassName;
while (superClassName != nil)
{
superClassName = [[superClassName class] superclass];
NSLog(print the name);
}

Answer 1

Try this
Class superClassName = [self class];
while (superClassName != nil)
{
superClassName = [superClassName superclass];
NSLog(#"%#",NSStringFromClass(superClassName));
}
If you know a class itself like NSString then,
Class superClassName = [NSString class];
You can store the class name to a string like
NSString *className = NSStringFromClass(superClassName);
And if you want to create an object of the class from which class name is stored in a string like
id object = [[NSClassFromString(className) alloc] init];

Answer 2

Use NSObject method names as :
objc_property_t class_getProperty(Class cls, const char *name)
//Returns a property with a given name of a given class.
Keep on finding till you get the NSObject as it is supermost class
Use this method to check for equality :
- (BOOL)isEqual:(id)object;
or
[object isKindOfClass:[SomeClass class]]
Documentation here
This will work

Answer 3

You can call superclass method on your current class until it gets equal to Nil (that will happen for root class, i.e. NSObject).
Class c = [IDontKnowWhatClass class];
while (c)
{
NSLog(#"%#", NSStringFromClass(c));
c = [c superclass];
}

Answer 4

NSString* classString = #"IDontKnowWhatClass";
Class class = NSClassFromString(classString);
while (class != nil){
NSLog(#"%#", [class description]);
class = [class superclass];
}