Shortcuts in Objective-C to concatenate NSStrings

Question

Are there any shortcuts to (stringByAppendingString:) string concatenation in Objective-C, or shortcuts for working with NSString in general?

Answer 1

This is for better logging, and logging only - based on dicius excellent multiple argument method. I define a Logger class, and call it like so:

[Logger log: @"foobar ", @" asdads ", theString, nil];

Almost good, except having to end the var args with "nil" but I suppose there's no way around that in Objective-C.

Logger.h

@interface Logger : NSObject {
}
+ (void) log: (id) first, ...;
@end

Logger.m

@implementation Logger

+ (void) log: (id) first, ...
{
    // TODO: make efficient; handle arguments other than strings
    // thanks to @diciu http://stackoverflow.com/questions/510269/how-do-i-concatenate-strings-in-objective-c
    NSString * result = @"";
    id eachArg;
    va_list alist;
    if(first)
    {
        result = [result stringByAppendingString:first];
        va_start(alist, first);
        while (eachArg = va_arg(alist, id)) 
        {
            result = [result stringByAppendingString:eachArg];
        }
        va_end(alist);
    }
    NSLog(@"%@", result);
}

@end 

In order to only concat strings, I'd define a Category on NSString and add a static (+) concatenate method to it that looks exactly like the log method above except it returns the string. It's on NSString because it's a string method, and it's static because you want to create a new string from 1-N strings, not call it on any one of the strings that are part of the append.