Objective-C NSString character substitution - objective-c

Question

I have a NSString category I am working on to perform character substitution similar to PHP's strtr. This method takes a string and replaces every occurrence of each character in fromString and replaces it with the character in toString with the same index. I have a working method but it is not very performant and would like to make it quicker and able to handle megabytes of data.
Edit (for clarity):
stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:withString:options:range: will not work. I have to take a string like "ABC" and after replacing "A" with "B" and "B" with "A" end up with "BAC". Successive invocations of stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:withString:options:range: would make a string like "AAC" which would be incorrect.
Suggestions would be great, sample code would be even better!
Code:
- (NSString *)stringBySubstitutingCharactersFromString:(NSString *)fromString
toString:(NSString *)toString;
{
NSMutableString *substitutedString = [self mutableCopy];
NSString *aCharacterString;
NSUInteger characterIndex
, stringLength = substitutedString.length;
for (NSUInteger i = 0; i < stringLength; ++i) {
aCharacterString = [NSString stringWithFormat: #"%C", [substitutedString characterAtIndex:i]];
characterIndex = [fromString rangeOfString:aCharacterString].location;
if (characterIndex == NSNotFound) continue;
[substitutedString replaceCharactersInRange:NSMakeRange(i, 1)
withString:[NSString stringWithFormat:#"%C", [toString characterAtIndex:characterIndex]]];
}
return substitutedString;
}
Also this code is executed after every change to text in a text view. It is passed the entire string every time. I know that there is a better way to do it, but I do not know how. Any suggestions for this would be most certainly appreciated!

Answer 1

You can make that kind of string substitution with NSRegularExpression either modifying an mutable string or creating a new immutable string. It will work with any two strings to substitute (even if they are more than one symbol) but you will need to escape any character that means something in a regular expression (like \ [ ( . * ? + etc).
The pattern finds either of the two substrings with the optional "anything" between and than replaces them with the two substrings with each other preserving the optional string between them.
// These string can be of any length
NSString *firstString = #"Axa";
NSString *secondString = #"By";
// Escaping of characters used in regular expressions has NOT been done here
NSString *pattern = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"(%#|%#)(.*?)(%#|%#)", firstString, secondString, firstString, secondString];
NSString *string = #"AxaByCAxaCBy";
NSError *error = NULL;
NSRegularExpression *regex = [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:pattern
options:NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive
error:&error];
if (error) {
// Insert error handling here...
}
NSString *modifiedString = [regex stringByReplacingMatchesInString:string
options:0
range:NSMakeRange(0, [string length])
withTemplate:#"$3$2$1"];
NSLog(#"Before:\t%#", string); // AxaByCAxaCBy
NSLog(#"After: \t%#", modifiedString); // ByAxaCByCAxa