Swift 2.1 [UInt8] --utf8--> String?

Question

I know questions like this exist on both Stack Overflow and elsewhere. But it seems to have evolved a lot as well.

Given a list of UInt8 (a swift byte a

Answer 1

Xcode 8 • Swift 3

extension Collection where Iterator.Element == UInt8 {
    var bytes: [UInt8] { return Array(self) }
    var data: Data { return Data(self) }
    var string: String? { return String(data: data, encoding: .utf8) }
}

extension String {
    var data: Data { return Data(utf8) }
}

usage:

let sentence = "Hello World"

let utf8View = sentence.utf8
let bytes = utf8View.bytes     // [72, 101, 108, 108, 111, 32, 87, 111, 114, 108, 100]

let data1 = sentence.data
print(data1 as NSData)         // <48656c6c 6f20576f 726c64>

let data2 = utf8View.data
let data3 = bytes.data
let string1 = utf8View.string  // "Hello World"
let string2 = bytes.string     // "Hello World"
let string3 = data1.string     // "Hello World"