Add objects in a NSMutableArray declared in another function - objective-c

Question

Ideally, I would like to make a function add objects in a NSMutableArray, and then do whatever I want with this array in another function.
Here is what I've tried to do lately, of course it doesn't work but it gives you an idea of what I want to do:
- (void)someThing
{
(...)
NSMutableArray *arrayOfThings = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];
while (theObject = [aNSEnumerator nextObject]) {
const char *theObject_fixed = [theObject UTF8String];
function_something(theObject_fixed);
}
// do something with arrayOfThings
}
void function_something(const char *file)
{
(...)
unsigned int *p = memmem(buffer, fileLen, bytes, 4);
NSMutableString *aString = [[NSMutableString alloc] initWithCapacity:48];
unsigned long off_to_string = 0x10 + 4 + ((void *)p) - ((void *)buffer);
for (unsigned long c = off_to_string; c<off_to_string+0x30; c++)
{
[aString appendFormat:#"%.2x", (int)buffer[c]];
}
NSLog(#"%s: %#", file, aString);
[arrayOfThings addObject:[aString copy]];
free(buffer);

Answer 1

There are two ways to go about this:
The first requires only a slight modification to your code will allow you to do what you want:
In the funciton someThing pass the mutable array as an additional parameter.
function_something(theObject_fixed, arrayOfThings);
Then change function_something to accept that parameter.
void function_something(const char *file, NSMutableArray *arrayOfThings) {
// Code remains the same
}
The other and in my opinion better solution would be for the function_something to return the fixed string as an NSString object and let someThing do the adding to the mutable array.
So we get something like this in someThing:
...
NSString *aString = function_something(theObject_fixed);
[arrayOfThings addObject:aString];
And then a redefined *function_something*:
NSString* function_something(const char *file) {
...
return [aString autorelease];
}
By the way, your code is leaking memory. Be careful with you retain/release/autorelease.