Better way to get the user's name from device?

Question

I made a function that extracts a user name from the device name.

The idea is to skip setup steps to allow the user to go straight to play

Answer 1

I'd like to offer an improvement on Ricky Helegesson's answer. It has the following features;

• It is a little smaller, although less efficient because it uses regular expressions, but then I suppose it should be called only once.
• I have expended it to include "phone" as well as "iPod, "iPhone" and "iPad".
• It only removes "'s" when it immediately preceded by "iPad", "iPhone" etc., but only at the end of the string.
• It removes "iPad" and so on when they are the first word, as in "iPad Simulator".
• It capitalises the first letter of each word.
• It is case insensitive.
• It is a function because it has no dependencies.

Here is the code:

NSArray * nameFromDeviceName(NSString * deviceName)
{
    NSError * error;
    static NSString * expression = (@"^(?:iPhone|phone|iPad|iPod)\\s+(?:de\\s+)?|"
                                    "(\\S+?)(?:['’]?s)?(?:\\s+(?:iPhone|phone|iPad|iPod))?$|"
                                    "(\\S+?)(?:['’]?的)?(?:\\s*(?:iPhone|phone|iPad|iPod))?$|"
                                    "(\\S+)\\s+");
    static NSRange RangeNotFound = (NSRange){.location=NSNotFound, .length=0};
    NSRegularExpression * regex = [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:expression
                                                                            options:(NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive)
                                                                              error:&error];
    NSMutableArray * name = [NSMutableArray new];
    for (NSTextCheckingResult * result in [regex matchesInString:deviceName
                                                         options:0
                                                           range:NSMakeRange(0, deviceName.length)]) {
        for (int i = 1; i < result.numberOfRanges; i++) {
            if (! NSEqualRanges([result rangeAtIndex:i], RangeNotFound)) {
                [name addObject:[deviceName substringWithRange:[result rangeAtIndex:i]].capitalizedString];
            }
        }
    }
    return name;
}

To use this for return a name;

NSString* name = [nameFromDeviceName(UIDevice.currentDevice.name) componentsJoinedByString:@" "];

This is somewhat complex, so I'll explain;

1. The regular expression holds three parts;
   1. At the start of the string, match but do not return "iPhone", "iPod", "iPad" or "phone" and an optional word "de".
   2. At the end of the string, match and return a word that is followed by and optional " 's" (which is not returned) and then "iPad", "iPhone", "iPod" or "phone" (which are not returned either).
   3. This match is the same as the previous, but it should work for Chinese device names. (Adapted from Travis Worm's submission. Please tell me if its wrong.)
   4. Match and return any word that doesn't match the previous rules.
2. Iterate through all the matches, capitalise them and add them to the array.
3. Return the array.

If a name ends in "s" without an apostrophe before "iPad" etc., I don't try to change it because there is not foolproof way of figuring out if the "s" is a part of the name or a pluralisation of the name.

Enjoy!