Check if property of object instance is 'blank' - objective-c

I am trying to implement the code below without success. Basically, I want to set the display name to use thisPhoto.userFullName if it is not 'Blank", else show thisPhoto.userName instead.
UILabel *thisUserNameLabel = (UILabel *)[cell.contentView viewWithTag:kUserNameValueTag];
NSLog(#"user full name %#",thisPhoto.userFullName);
NSLog(#"user name %#",thisPhoto.userName);
if (thisPhoto.userFullName && ![thisPhoto.userFullName isEqual:[NSNull null]] )
{
thisUserNameLabel.text = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"%#",thisPhoto.userFullName];
}
else if (thisPhoto.userFullName == #"")
{
thisUserNameLabel.text = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"%#",thisPhoto.userName];
}
Currently, even if userFullName is blank, my userName is still not displayed on the screen.

I'd prefer
if([thisPhoto.userFullName length])

Use -length. This will be 0 whenever the string is nil or the empty string #"". You generally want to treat both cases identically.
NSString *fullName = [thisPhoto userFullName];
thisUserNameLabel.text = [fullName length]? fullName : [thisPhoto userName];

I see a few points here
First - if your userFullName instance variable is NSString* then doing simple comparison with nil is enough:
if (thisPhoto.userFullName)
Unless, of course, you explicitly set it to be [NSNull null], which then requires the condition you wrote.
Second - comparing strings is done with isEqualToString: method so second condition should be rewritten as:
if ([thisPhoto.userFullName isEqualToString:#""]) {
...
}
Third - there's logic flaw - If your userFullName IS equal to empty string (#"") the code would still fall to the first branch. I.e. empty string (#"") is not equal to [NSNull null] or simple nil. Hence you should write to branches - one to handle empty string and nil, other one for normal value. So with a bit of refactoring your code becomes like this:
thisUserNameLabel.text = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"%#",thisPhoto.userFullName];
if (!thisPhoto.userFullName || [thisPhoto.userFullName isEqualToString:#""]) {
// do the empty string dance in case of empty userFullName.
}

If, as I suppose, thisPhoto.userFullName is a NSString you may try
[thisPhoto.userFullName isEqualToString:#""]

The other two answers are correct, and beat me to it. Rather than just repeat what they have said - I'll point out something else.
[NSNull null] is used to store nil values in collection classes (NSArray, NSSet, NSDictionary) that don't allow nil values to be stored in them.
So unless you're checking values that you get from a collection - there is no point checking against [NSNull null]

// this assumes userFullName and userName are strings and that userName is not nil
thisUserNameLabel.text = [thisPhoto.userFullName length] > 0 ? thisPhoto.userFullName : thisPhoto.userName;

"Blank" means #"", but also #" " or #"\n". So I would trim userFullName and check the length of that string.
if ([[thisPhoto.userFullName stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:
[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]] length] == 0) {
// it's blank!
}

Related

null, nill is string type in Objective-C

//result: ok fine
NSString *email = [dataDic objectForKey:#"email"];
if([email isEqualToString:#"null"])
email = nil;
if((![email length]) == 0)
self.emailLbl.text = email;
// result: not fine
NSString *email = [dataDic objectForKey:#"email"];
if((![email length]) == 0 || (email != nil) )
self.emailLbl.text = email;
In dictionary, email property value contained null value. My question is what is the type of nil? -> if comparison email == nil || email == [NSNull null] ?
There are several values that are different from Objective-C perspective here:
nil (aka null in other languages)
[NSNull null] (a special marker value object)
#"" (empty string)
#"null" (just a string with 4 characters)
If you write your dataDic from your app, and you know that your app handles it well, you don't have to check all the cases. Check only the ones you expect. For example, if your app only writes non-empty strings to the dictionary, but sometimes "email" is not there, you only have to check nil, because objectForKey returns nil if the value is not inside the dictionary.
On the other hand if you have obtained dataDic from a 3rd party API, decoded from JSON for example, then you should do the full checking:
[NSNull null] is placed inside the dictionary if JSON has null originally like {"email":null}
If the server API changed you might get some other structure than NSString there (although quite unlikely here).
nil is returned if you don't have the key/value at all.
You can rule out all the 3 checks at once by doing:
NSString *emailStr = nil;
id emailObj = [dataDic objectForKey:#"email"];
if ([emailObj isKindOfClass:[NSString class]]) {
emailStr = emailObj;
}
Note that you might not have to check for an empty string or nil before assigning to UILabel text, because those work fine and just erase the label text:
self.emailLbl.text = #"";
self.emailLbl.text = nil; // another way to erase
You should check whether the key #"email" contain any value or not like (if its a String)
NSString *email=dic[#"email"];
if (email) {
//do anything with email
}
if you want to check your object is Nil Or Null then do
if (!email || email == (id)[NSNull null]) {
//email unavailable
}
Alternately you can call [Obj isKindOfClass:[NSNull class]] on any object.

How to check if NSString returned by objectForKey is "" objective c

I'm not exactly sure how to check whether a NSString is blank or not, I've got this code...
NSString *imageName = [myItem objectForKey:#"iconName"];
if(imageName == #"")
{
}
And when I do a print on the myItem object, it comes up as..
iconName = "";
At the NSString *imageName line, I noticed in xcode in the console it says
"variable is not NSString"
Which I don't get as iconName is saved and stored on the parse.com database as a NSString.
When I run that code though it doesn't seem to realise that imageName = "";
You should use this code block when comparing strings:
if ([imageName isEqualToString:#""]){
}
You need to use isEqualToString to compare two strings. If you just use == then you are comparing two pointers.
You could also check to see if the object you are receiving is a NSString by:
if ([imageName isKindOfClass:[NSString class]])
Hope this helps.
Although you have a few answers already, here is my take.
First of all, your warning (not error) can be fixed like this:
NSString *imageName = (NSString *)[myItem objectForKey:#"iconName"];
Then, I would check to make sure that the string is not nil and that it is not blank. The easiest way to do this in objective-C is to check the length of the string, since if it nil it will return 0, and if it is empty, it will return 0:
if([imageName length] == 0)
{
// This is an empty string.
}
As #jlehr points out, if there is the possibility that imageName may not actually be stored as a string, then in order to prevent a crash you need to check first. (This may or may not be needed, depending on the logic of your application):
if ([imageName isKindOfClass:[NSString class]]
{
if([imageName length] == 0)
{
// This is an empty string.
}
}
The "variable is not NSString" is probably because objectForKey: return an id.
To should use [imageName isEqualToString:#""].

Converting NSNumber to NSString is not realy a string

I have got a problem with converting an NSNumber value to an NSString
MyPowerOnOrNot is an NSNumber witch can only return a 1 or 0
and myString is an NSString..
myString = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"%d", [myPowerOnOrNot stringValue]];
NSLog(#"%#",myString);
if(myString == #"1") {
[tablearrayPOWERSTATUS addObject:[NSString stringWithFormat:#"%#",#"ON"]];
}
else if(myString == #"0") {
[tablearrayPOWERSTATUS addObject:[NSString stringWithFormat:#"%#",#"OFF"]];
}
What is wrong with this?
The NSLog shows 0 or 1 in the console as a string but I can't check it if it is 1 or 0 in an if statement?
If doesn't jump into the statements when it actually should.. I really don't understand why this doesn't works..
Any help would be very nice!
A couple of problems
myString = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"%d", [myPowerOnOrNot stringValue]];
-stringValue sent to an NSNumber gives you a reference to a string. The format specifier %d is for the C int type. What would happen in this case is that myString would contain the address of the NSString returned by [myPowerOnOrNot stringValue]. Or, on 64 bit, it would return half of that address. You could actually use [myPowerOnOrNot stringValue] directly and avoid the relatively expensive -stringWithFormat:
if(myString == #"1")
myString and #"1" are not necessarily the same object. Your condition only checks that the references are identical. In general with Objective-C you should use -isEqual: for equality of objects, but as we know these are strings, you can use -isEqualToString:
if ([[myPowerOnOrNot stringValue] isEqualToString: #"1"])
Or even better, do a numeric comparison of your NSNumber converted to an int.
if ([myPowerOnOrNot intValue] == 1)
Finally if myPowerOnOrNot is not supposed to have any value other than 0 or 1, consider having a catchall else that asserts or throws an exception just in case myPowerOnOrNot accidentally gets set wrong by a bug.
"myString " is a reference to a string, not the value of the string itself.
The == operator will compare the reference to your string literal and so never return true.
Instead use
if( [myString isEqualToString:#"1"] )
This will compare the value of myString to "1"
In Objective C; you can't compare strings for equality using the == operator.
What you want to do here is as follows:
[tablearrayPOWERSTATUS addObject:([myPowerOnOrNot integerValue]?#"ON":#"OFF"])];
Compact, fast, delicious.

String compare Objective-C

I've been struggling with a simple comparison but I can't get it to work.
I´m reading a XML file and I need to compare data from it in order to show the right picture.
http://www.cleaner.se/larm.xml (Example file for parsing)
I have tried things like:
if([aLarm.larmClass isEqualToString:#"A"])
NSLog(#"same");
else
NSLog(#"Not same");
If I use: NSLog(aLarm.larmClass); console puts it out nicely as it should. What am I doing wrong?
You can use the NSString compare: methods. For example:
if ([myString caseInsensitiveCompare:#"A"] == NSOrderedSame ) {
NSLog(#"The same");
} else {
NSLog(#"Not the same.");
}
The result is an NSComparisonResult which is just an enum with types NSOrderedSame, NSOrderedAscending and NSOrderedDescending.
Check the documentation on the various compare: methods here.
Of course, if the receiver is actually an NSString, then isEqualToString: should also work. So if you're trying to compare a class name (aLarm.larmClass ??), then you can call:
if ([NSStringFromClass([aLarm class]) isEqualToString:#"A"] ) {
NSLog(#"The same");
}
If the larmClass property is a string, make sure that it is actually one character in length (i.e. it doesn't have any leading or trailing whitespace that was accidentally included when parsing the XML). If the larmClass property truly is an NSString containing the letter ‘A’ then [aLarm.larmClass isEqualToString:#"A"] will return YES.
Do a:
NSLog(#"%u, %#", [aLarm.larmClass length], aLarm.larmClass);
and just make sure that it shows “1, A”.

If else statment not work in my app

I´m making a dictionary (this is my test app)
here is my code which not work:
- (IBAction) btnClickMe_Clicked:(id)sender {
NSString *kw = s.text;
NSString *encodedkw = [kw stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSString *mms = [NSString stringWithFormat: #"%#", encodedkw];
if (mms=NULL){
iMessageLabel.text=#"put text";
} else if (mms=#"a"){
iMessageLabel.text=#"this is a";
} else if (mms=#"b"){
iMessageLabel.text=#"this is b";
}
}
anybody have some idea with this ?
thanks
ALex
You cannot use == on NSString objects. Try doing this:
if (encodedkw == nil){
iMessageLabel.text=#"put text";
} else if ([encodedkw isEqualToString:#"a"]){
iMessageLabel.text=#"this is a";
} else if ([encodedkw isEqualToString:#"b"]){
iMessageLabel.text=#"this is b";
}
mms should be equal to encodedkw so I switched to using that. Also I'm using isEqualToString for string comparison. Finally, I've changed the null check to check against nil instead of NULL.
You've used = rather than ==
May it happen, that you need to call some kind of string manipulation routine like compare to compare strings, not just comparing the pointers?
Besides mms=NIL means assignment NIL to mms not comparison desired.
Upd.: NIL does not mean empty string. You should write [mms length] == 0 instead to see if the string is empty.