In Objective-C Determine if a Property is an int, float, double, NSString, NSDate, NSNumber, etc

Question

I need to determine an object\'s property (passed by name) type in order to perform deserialization from XML. I have some general pseudo-code (however I am unsure of how to

Answer 1

If you only care about classes you can use isKindOfClass:, but if you want to deal with scalars you are correct that you need to use property_getAttributes(), it returns a string that encodes the type information. Below is a basic function that demonstrates what you need to do. For examples of encoding strings, look here.

unsigned int outCount, i;
objc_property_t *properties = class_copyPropertyList([object class], &outCount);
for (i = 0; i < outCount; i++) {
    objc_property_t property = properties[i];
    char *property_name = property_getName(property);
    char *property_type = property_getAttributes(property);

    switch(property_type[1]) {
      case 'f' : //float
        break;
      case 's' : //short
        break;
      case '@' : //ObjC object
        //Handle different clases in here
        break;
    }
}

Obvviously you will need to add all the types and classes you need to handle to this, it uses the normal ObjC @encode types.