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

My preferred method is this:

NSString *firstString = @"foo";
NSString *secondString = @"bar";
NSString *thirdString = @"baz";

NSString *joinedString = [@[firstString, secondString, thirdString] join];

You can achieve it by adding the join method to NSArray with a category:

#import "NSArray+Join.h"
@implementation NSArray (Join)
-(NSString *)join
{
    return [self componentsJoinedByString:@""];
}
@end

@[] it's the short definition for NSArray, I think this is the fastest method to concatenate strings.

If you don't want to use the category, use directly the componentsJoinedByString: method:

NSString *joinedString = [@[firstString, secondString, thirdString] componentsJoinedByString:@""];