Sample Code « Vincent Gable’s Blog

August 19, 2010

The Most Useful Objective-C Code I’ve Ever Written

Filed under: Announcement,Bug Bite,iPhone,MacOSX,Objective-C,Programming,Research,Sample Code | C++, Debugging, LOG_EXPR, macros, NSLog, Preprocessor, printf
― Vincent Gable on August 19, 2010

Actually, it’s the most useful code I’ve extended; credit for the core idea goes to Dave Dribin with his Handy NSString Conversion Macro.

LOG_EXPR(x) is a macro that prints out x, no matter what type x is, without having to worry about format-strings (and related crashes from eg. printing a C-string the same way as an NSString). It works on Mac OS X and iOS. Here are some examples,

LOG_EXPR(self.window.screen);

self.window.screen = <UIScreen: 0x6d20780; bounds = {{0, 0}, {320, 480}}; mode = <UIScreenMode: 0x6d20c50; size = 320.000000 x 480.000000>>

LOG_EXPR(self.tabBarController.viewControllers);

self.tabBarController.viewControllers = (
“<UINavigationController: 0xcd02e00>”,
“<SavingsViewController: 0xcd05c40>”,
“<SettingsViewController: 0xcd05e90>”
)

Pretty straightforward, really. The biggest convenience so far is having the expression printed out, so you don’t have to write out a name redundantly in the format string (eg. NSLog(@"actionURL = %@", actionURL)). But LOG_EXPR really shows it’s worth when you start using scalar or struct expressions:

LOG_EXPR(self.window.windowLevel);

self.window.windowLevel = 0.000000

LOG_EXPR(self.window.frame.size);

self.window.frame.size = {320, 480}

Yes, there are expressions that won’t work, but they’re pretty rare for me. I use LOG_EXPR every day. Several times. It’s not quite as good as having a REPL for Cocoa, but it’s handy.

Give it a try.

How It Works

The problem is how to pick a function or format string to print x, based on the type of x. C++’s type-based dispatch would be a good fit here, but it’s verbose (a full function-definition per type) and I wanted to use pure Objective-C if possible. Fortunately, Objective-C has an @encode() compiler directive that returns a string describing any type it’s given. Unfortunately it works on types, not variables, but with C99 the typeof() compiler directive lets us get the type of any variable, which we can pass to @encode(). The final bit of compiler magic is using stringification (#) to print out the literal string inside LOG_EXPR()‘s parenthesis.

The Macro, Line By Line

1 #define LOG_EXPR(_X_) do{\
2 	__typeof__(_X_) _Y_ = (_X_);\
3 	const char * _TYPE_CODE_ = @encode(__typeof__(_X_));\
4 	NSString *_STR_ = VTPG_DDToStringFromTypeAndValue(_TYPE_CODE_, &_Y_);\
5 	if(_STR_)\
6 		NSLog(@"%s = %@", #_X_, _STR_);\
7 	else\
8 		NSLog(@"Unknown _TYPE_CODE_: %s for expression %s in function %s, file %s, line %d", _TYPE_CODE_, #_X_, __func__, __FILE__, __LINE__);\
9 }while(0)

The first and last lines are a way to put {}‘s around the macro to prevent unintended effects. The do{}while(0); “loop” does nothing else.
First evaluate the expression, _X_, given to LOG_EXPR once, and store the result in a _Y_. We need to use typeof() (which had to be written __typeof__() to appease some versions of GCC) to figure out the type of _Y_.
_TYPE_CODE_ is c-string that describes the type of the expression we want to print out.
Now we have enough information to call a function, VTPG_DDToStringFromTypeAndValue() to convert the expression’s value to a string. We pass it the _TYPE_CODE_ string, and the address of _Y_, which is a pointer, and has a known size. We can’t pass _Y_ directly, because depending on what _X_ is, it will have different types and could be of any size.
VTPG_DDToStringFromTypeAndValue() returns nil if it can’t figure out how to convert a value to a string.
Everything went well, print the stringified expression, #_X_, and the string representing it’s value, _STR_.
otherwise…
The expression had a type we can’t handle, print out a verbose diagnostic message.
See line 1.

The `VTPG_DDToStringFromTypeAndValue()` Function

See the source in VTPG_Common.m:

(Your browser does not support iframes.)

It’s derived from Dave Dribin‘s function DDToStringFromTypeAndValue(), and is pretty straightforward: strcmp() the type-string, and if it matches a known type call a function, or use +[NSString stringWithFormat]:, to turn the value into a string.

The First Step Twords Fixing Your Macro Problem is Admitting it…

So yeah, maybe I went a little wild with macros here…

But it took out some WET-ness of the original code, and prevents me from accidentally mixing up types in a long wall of ifs, eg.

else if (strcmp(typeCode, @encode(NSRect)) == 0)
{
    return NSStringFromRect(*(NSRange *)value);
}
else if (strcmp(typeCode, @encode(NSRange)) == 0)
{
    return NSStringFromRect(*(NSRange *)value);
}

If I were cool, I’d use NSDictionarys to map from the @encode-string to an appropriate format string or function pointer. This is conceptually cleaner; less error-prone than using macros; and almost certainly faster. Unfortunately, it gets a little tricky with functions, since I need to deference value into the proper type.

One final note from my testing, I could do away with the strcmp()s, because directly comparing @encode string pointers (eg if(typeCode == @encode(NSString*)) works. I don’t know if it will always work though, so relying on it strikes me as a profoundly Bad Idea. But maybe that bad idea will give someone a good idea.

Limitations

Arrays

C arrays generally muck things up. Casting to a pointer works around this:

char x[14] = "Hello, world!";
//LOG_EXPR(x); //error: invalid initializer
LOG_EXPR((char*)x); //prints fine

`func`

Because it is a static const char [], __func__ (and __FUNCTION__ or __PRETTY_FUNCTION__) need casting to char* to work with LOG_EXPR. Because logging out a function/method call is something I do frequently, I use the macro:

#define LOG_FUNCTION()	NSLog(@"%s", __func__)

`long double` (Leopard and older)

On older systems, LOG_EXPR won’t work with a long double value, because @encode(long double) gives the same result as @encode(double). This is a known issue with the runtime. The top-level LOG_EXPR macro could detect a long double with if((sizeof(_X_) == sizeof(long double)) && (_TYPE_CODE_ == @encode(double))). But I doubt this will ever be necessary.

I haven’t actually written any code that uses long double, because I use NSDecimal, or another base-10 number format, for situations that require more precision than a double.

Scaling and Frameworks

Growing LOG_EXPR to handle every type is a lot of work. I’ve only added types that I’ve actually needed to print. This has kept the code manageable, and seems to be working so far.

The biggest problem I have is how to deal with types that are in frameworks that not every project includes. Projects that use CoreLocation.framework need to be able to use LOG_EXPR to print out CoreLocation specific structs, like CLLocationCoordinate2D. But projects that don’t use CoreLocation.framework don’t have a definition of the CLLocationCoordinate2D type, so code to convert it to a string won’t compile. There are two ways I’ve tried to solve the problem

Comment-out framework-specific code

This is pretty self-explanatory, I’ll fork VTPG_Common.m and un-comment-out code for types that my project needs to print. It works, but it’s drudgery. Programmers hate that.

Hardcode type info

The idea is to hard-code the string that @encode(SomeType) would evaluate to, and then (since we know how SomeType is laid out in memory) use casting and pointer-arithmetic to get at the fields.

For example:

//This is a hack to print out CLLocationCoordinate2D, without needing to #import <CoreLocation/CoreLocation.h>
//A CLLocationCoordinate2D is a struct made up of 2 doubles.
//We detect it by hard-coding the result of @encode(CLLocationCoordinate2D).
//We get at the fields by treating it like an array of doubles, which it is identical to in memory.
if(strcmp(typeCode, "{?=dd}")==0)//@encode(CLLocationCoordinate2D)
	return [NSString stringWithFormat:@"{latitude=%g,longitude=%g}",((double*)value)[0],((double*)value)[1]];

This Just Works in a project that includes CoreLocation, and doesn’t mess up projects that don’t. Unfortunately it’s horribly brittle. Any Xcode or system update could break it. It’s not a tenable fix.

Areas for Improvement

If there’s some type LOG_EXPR can’t handle that you need, please jump right in and improve it!

When I have time, I plan to write a general parser for @encode()-strings. This will let me print out any struct, which mostly solves the type-defined-in-missing-framework problem, and would let LOG_EXPR Just Work with types from all kinds of POSIX/C libraries.

Using `LOG_EXPR()` in Your Project

Download VTPG_Common.m and VTPG_Common.h from my github repository, and add them to your Xcode project.

Now just add the line #import "VTPG_Common.h" to your prefix file (named <ProjectName>_Prefix.pch by default), after the #ifdef __OBJC__, for example:

#ifdef __OBJC__
    #import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
    // maybe other files, depending on project  template...
    #import "VTPG_Common.h"
#endif

Now LOG_EXPR() will work everywhere in your project.

Comments (19)

August 15, 2010

My UIViewController Template

Filed under: iPhone,Objective-C,Programming,Sample Code | Best Practices, Template, UIViewController, Xcode
― Vincent Gable on August 15, 2010

I haven’t formalized this as a proper Xcode template, but this is what’s in my PrototypeViewController.m file that I copy/paste over the UIViewController subclasses Xcode makes.


@interface MyViewController ()
@end

@implementation MyViewController
- (void) releaseViewObjects;
{
	if([[self superclass] instancesRespondToSelector:@selector(releaseViewObjects)])
		[(id)super releaseViewObjects];
}

- (void)viewDidUnload;
{
    [super viewDidUnload];
    [self releaseViewObjects];
}

- (void)dealloc;
{
    [self releaseViewObjects];
    [super dealloc];
}

@end

Here are the reasons why, in no particular order:

Commented-Out Code is Evil

Littering source code with “comments” full of crufty, obsolete, or unimplemented code is not a good thing. Xcode’s default template is full of commented-out code. If you’re totally new to the platform, starting from the templates aren’t a bad way to learn. But in my experiance, they do harm to a production code-base, by injecting hundreds of lines of commented-out code into a project.

Share code between `viewDidUnload` and `dealloc` With `releaseViewObjects`

In my world, releaseViewObjects is solely responsible for cleaning up every IBOutlet, and any objects created in viewDidLoad.

There are technical reasons why this is a little scary. Calling a method in dealloc is potentially risky, because the object may be in an invalid half-torn-down state, and because Dark Runtime Magicks could be afoot (see Using Accessors in Init and Dealloc.)

But in my experience, such bugs, although as scary as they sound, are rare corner-cases and still quite fixable. But every UIViewController needs to clean up after itself, so simplifying the universally common case is a net win.

The if([[self superclass] instancesRespondToSelector:@selector(releaseViewObjects)]) test wouldn’t be necessary if I added another class between UIViewController and my real code, so that I was sure my class’ super implemented releaseViewObjects. But adding a subclass just to implement one empty method, to avoid a two-line test, isn’t worth it.

The (id)super cast is intentional, to prevent compiler warnings.

I have to use the more complex [[self superclass] instancesRespondToSelector: test, because -[super respondsToSelector:] doesn’t work.

I Won’t Really Get To `didReceiveMemoryWarning`

I’m not proud to admit this, but it’s true. We’ve all been told that a good iPhone program must release resources when it gets a memory warning, or else it will be killed. But in practice, there have always been better places to spend my time (or at least it sure feels that way!) Spending a few hours in Instruments to fix leaks prevents memory warnings in the first place, and that’s a bigger win.

Besides, 80% of what didReceiveMemoryWarning would do is handled in releaseViewObjects, which is automatically called by the default implementation.

So I break with Xcode and leave didReceiveMemoryWarning out of my template, because the default class won’t use it.

What About `init`?

I don’t have a default init(With…) method. I try to use autorelease-ed objects everywhere I can, so I’m more comfortable implementing +[MyViewController viewControllerForFoo:].

But I don’t have a default constructor of any kind, because a constructor should take every value it needs, and I don’t know what these values are until I’ve written a bit more of the class. It’s a chicken and egg problem.

Once I’ve written out a bit more of the class, I’ll usually build something that looks like:

+ (RouteMapViewController*) routeMapViewControllerWithWaypoints:(NSArray*)waypoints mapRegion:(MKCoordinateRegion)region;
{
	RouteMapViewController *vc = [[[self class] new] autorelease];
	vc.title = NSLocalizedString(@"The Path",@"");
	vc.hidesBottomBarWhenPushed = YES;
	vc.waypoints = waypoints;
	vc.mapRegion = region;
	return vc;
}

For what it’s worth I use this pattern to implement a 0-argument -init.

Empty Class Extension

Class extensions are the best way to have “private” things in Objective-C. They let the compiler catch objects using another object’s private methods. They let a class have publicly readonly, but internally readwrite, properties.

Bottom line: every nontrivial object I’ve written uses them, so they’re in my template.

Nothing Else (For Now)

My template is smaller than Xcode’s. That is by design. Outside of esoteric contests, having less code to maintain is a good thing. So I prefer a template that tries very hard to avoid adding code I don’t need.

Do you disagree with any of my choices? Please leave a comment explaining why.

Comments (1)

October 16, 2009

Hack: Counting Variadic Arguments in C

Filed under: Design,Programming,Research,Sample Code,Usability | C++, Introspection, Parsing, Programming Language Design, Variadic Functions, Variadic Macros
― Vincent Gable on October 16, 2009

This isn’t practical, but I think it’s neat that it’s doable in C99. The implementation I present here is incomplete and for illustrative purposes only.

Background

C’s implementation of variadic functions (functions that take a variable-number of arguments) is characteristically bare-bones. Even though the compiler knows the number, and type, of all arguments passed to variadic functions; there isn’t a mechanism for the function to get this information from the compiler. Instead, programmers need to pass an extra argument, like the printf format-string, to tell the function “these are the arguments I gave you”. This has worked for over 37 years. But it’s clunky — you have to write the same information twice, once for the compiler and again to tell the function what you told the compiler.

Inspecting Arguments in C

Argument Type

I don’t know of a way to find the type of the Nth argument to a varadic function, called with heterogeneous types. If you can figure out a way, I’d love to know. The typeof extension is often sufficient to write generic code that works when every argument has the same type. (C++ templates also solve this problem if we step outside of C-proper.)

Argument Count (The Good Stuff Starts Here)

By using variadic macros, and stringification (#), we can actually pass a function the literal string of its argument list from the source code — which it can parse to determine how many arguments it was given.

For example, say f() is a variadic function. We create a variadic wrapper macro, F() and call it like so in our source code,

x = F(a,b,c);

The preprocessor expands this to,

x = f("a,b,c",a,b,c)

Or perhaps,

x = f(count_arguments("a,b,c"),a,b,c)

where count_arguments(char *s) returns the number of arguments in the string source-code string s. (Technically s would be an argument-expression-list).

Example Code

Here’s an implementation for, iArray(), an array-builder for int values, very much like JavaScript‘s Array() constructor. Unlike the quirky JavaScript Array(), iArray(3) returns an array containing just the element 3, [3], not an uninitilized array with 3 elements, [undefined, undefined, undefined]. Another difference: iArray(), invoked with no arguments, is invalid, and will not compile.

#define iArray(...) alloc_ints(count_arguments(#__VA_ARGS__), __VA_ARGS__)

This macro is pretty straightforward. It’s given a variable number of arguments, represented by __VA_ARGS__ in the expansion. #__VA_ARGS__ turns the code into a string so that count_arguments can analyze it. (If you were doing this for real, you should use two levels of stringification though, otherwise macros won’t be fully expanded. I choose to keep things “demo-simple” here.)

unsigned count_arguments(char *s){
	unsigned i,argc = 1;
		for(i = 0; s[i]; i++)
			if(s[i] == ',')
				argc++;
	return argc;
}

This is a dangerously naive implementation and only works correctly when iArray() is given a straightforward non-empty list of values or variables. Basically it’s the least code I could write to make a working demo.

Since iArray must have at least one argument to compile, we just count the commas in the argument-list to see how many other arguments were passed. Simple to code, but it fails for more complex expressions like f(a,g(b,c)).

int *alloc_ints(unsigned count, ...){
	unsigned i = 0;
	int *ints = malloc(sizeof(int) * count);
	va_list args;
    va_start(args, count);
	for(i = 0; i < count; i++)
		ints[i] = va_arg(args,int);
	va_end(args);
	return ints;
}

Just as you'd expect, this code allocates enough memory to hold count ints, and fills it with the remaining count arguments. Bad things happen if < count arguments are passed, or they are the wrong type.

Download the code, if you like.

Parsing is Hard, Let's Go Shopping

I didn't even try to correctly parse any valid argument-expression-list in count_arguments. It's non trivial. I'd rather deal with choosing the correct MAX3 or MAX4 macro in a few places than maintain such a code base.

So this kind of introspection isn't really practical in C. But it's neat that it can be done, without any tinkering with the compiler or language.

Comments (0)

May 31, 2009

The Best Quicksort Ever

Filed under: Design,Programming,Sample Code | Algorithms, College, Functional Programming, Haskell, Quicksort
― Vincent Gable on May 31, 2009

The first time I saw this quicksort in Haskell was an eye opening moment,

 
qsort []     = []
qsort (x:xs) = qsort (filter (< x) xs) ++ [x] ++ qsort (filter (>= x) xs)
The first line reads: “When you sort an empty list ([]), the result is another empty list”. The second line reads: “To sort a list whose first element is named x and the rest of which is named xs, sort the elements of xs that are less than x, sort the elements of xs that are greater than or equal to x, and concatenate (++) the results, with x sandwiched in the middle.”

The code is so concise, yet clear (even with cryptic variable names like xs). The day my professor wrote it on the whiteboard was the first time I internalized that there might be something good about the alien world of functional programming.

The biggest revelation to me was, filter (< x) xs . It’s amazing that (< x) builds a temporary, unnamed, function equivalent to C++,

bool lessThanX(AnyOrderedType y){
    return y < X;
}
//plus the definition of X somewhere...

Building a function! It’s still profound stuff to me. And clearly it really uses fewer lines of code. Amazingly, using list comprehension syntax is not more concise,

qsort (x:xs) = qsort [i | i <- xs, i < x] ++ [x] ++ qsort [i | i <- xs, i <= x]

compared to the original,

qsort (x:xs) = qsort (filter (< x) xs) ++ [x] ++ qsort (filter (>= x) xs)

I hope this is an ah-ah moment for someone else too. I’d love to know what made you interested in functional programming; or if you know of a more elegant quicksort implementation.

Comments (1)

May 19, 2009

Improving Twitter.com: Space to Work

Filed under: Design,Sample Code,Tips,Usability | CSS, HTML, Safari, Twitter, Web, Writing
― Vincent Gable on May 19, 2009

The Change

Enlarge the “What are you doing” box on Twitter.com, to make compressing substantial ideas easier.

Motivation

I’ve been disappointed with the posting interface of every Twitter-client I’ve tried so far. Just like any writing, tweets start with a first draft. My first drafts are often longer than 140 characters. That shouldn’t be a problem; trimming the fat is part of any editing process. But most Twitter-interfaces are so downright hostile to anything longer then 140 characters that trimming a 145 letter utterance is a frustrating study in fighting my tools.

(The worst client I tried was, Blogo, which would stop you from typing and yell at you with a dialog if you dared press another key after typing 140 characters. But Twitterrific was little better; I don’t understand how something so user-unfriendly became so popular.)

Even Twitter.com doesn’t give you enough room for writing a long, but under-the-limit tweet. To see for yourself, just start typing “mmmmm”; the box will run out of room before you run out of characters. It’s downright crazy to have to scroll to see all of a tweet you are writing.

Now there’s nothing wrong with trying to prescribe a pithy style of communication. Clearly Twitter wouldn’t have worked otherwise. But punishing users for doing the “wrong” thing isn’t as effective as giving them the tools to change their behavior, to wit: space to work on shortening their writing.

The Code

This CSS code makes the direct-messaging, and “what are you doing?” text-boxes tall enough to hold 5 lines of text without scrolling. By default Twitter’s web interface only holds 2 lines of text on screen.

#dm_update_box #direct_message_form fieldset div.info textarea#text,
#status_update_box #status_update_form fieldset div.info textarea#status {
	height: 6em !important;
}

The selectors I used are pretty specific to Twitter.com, so it’s unlikely this will interfere with another site’s layout, unless it’s HTML code is nearly identical to Twitter’s.

How-To: Safari

Copy the above code into a .css file, (“CustomSafari.css” is what I called mine) then select that file in Safari -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Style sheet:

After restarting Safari, Twitter’s web interface should give you room to work.

Comments (0)

May 15, 2009

Concise NSDictionary and NSArray Lookup

Filed under: Objective-C,Programming,Research,Sample Code,Usability | NSArray, NSDictionary, Programming Language Design
― Vincent Gable on May 15, 2009

I started writing a list of ways I thought Objective-C could be improved, and I realized that many of my wishes involved more compact syntax. For example [array objectAtIndex:1] is so verbose I think it diminishes readability, compared to array[1].

I can’t quite match that brevity (can you, by using Objective-C++?), but with a one-line category, you can say, x = [array:1];.

@interface NSArray (ConciseLookup)
- (id):(NSUInteger)index;
@end
@implementation NSArray (ConciseLookup)
- (id):(NSUInteger)index;
{
	return [self objectAtIndex:index];
}
@end

My question is: do you find this compact “syntax” useful at all, or is it added complexity with no substantial code compression? Personally I think the latter, but the number of wishes I had involving more concise Objective-C syntax makes me wonder…

Comments (2)

April 24, 2009

How To Check if an Application is Running With AppleScript

Filed under: Programming,Sample Code | Apple Script, System Events
― Vincent Gable on April 24, 2009

on ApplicationIsRunning(appName)
	tell application "System Events" to set appNameIsRunning to exists (processes where name is appName)
	return appNameIsRunning
end ApplicationIsRunning

Use it like,

if ApplicationIsRunning("Mail") then
	display dialog "Don't forget to write mom!"
end if

On Mac OS X 10.5, this worked for me even when the application-file’s name was changed. On 10.4 I do not expect that it would still work if someone renamed the application, unless you used the creator type to locate the process, not the name.

You might also be interested in how to get the name of the frontmost application, here’s how:

tell application "System Events" to set FrontAppName to name of first process where frontmost is true

if FrontAppName is "DVD Player" then
	display dialog "Get to work!"
end if

Comments (3)

April 22, 2009

-[NSURL isEqual:] Gotcha

Filed under: Bug Bite,Cocoa,iPhone,MacOSX,Programming,Sample Code | Best Practices, isEqual:, NSArray, NSDictionary, NSSet, NSString, NSURL
― Vincent Gable on April 22, 2009

BREAKING UPDATE: Actually comparing the -absoluteURL or -absoluteString of two NSURLs that represent a file is not good enough. One may start file:///, and the other file://localhost/, and they will not be isEqual:! A work around is to compare the path of each NSURL. I’m still looking into the issue, but for now I am using the following method to compare NSURLs.

@implementation NSURL (IsEqualTesting)
- (BOOL) isEqualToURL:(NSURL*)otherURL;
{
	return [[self absoluteURL] isEqual:[otherURL absoluteURL]] || 
	[self isFileURL] && [otherURL isFileURL] &&
	([[self path] isEqual:[otherURL path]]);
}
@end

[a isEqual:b] may report NO for two NSURLs that both resolve to the same resource (website, file, whatever). So compare NSURLs like [[a absoluteString] isEqual:[b absoluteString]]. It’s important to be aware of this gotcha, because URLs are Apple’s preferred way to represent file paths, and APIs are starting to require them. Equality tests that worked for NSString file-paths may fail with NSURL file-paths.

The official documentation says

two NSURLs are considered equal if they both have the same base baseURL and relativeString.

Furthermore,

An NSURL object is composed of two parts—a potentially nil base URL and a string that is resolved relative to the base URL. An NSURL object whose string is fully resolved without a base is considered absolute; all others are considered relative.

In other words, two NSURL objects can resolve to the same absolute URL, but have a different base URL, and be considered !isEqual:.

An example should make this all clear,

NSURL *VGableDotCom = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://vgable.com"];
NSURL *a = [[NSURL alloc] initWithString:@"blog" relativeToURL:VGableDotCom];
NSURL *b = [[NSURL alloc] initWithString:@"http://vgable.com/blog" relativeToURL:nil];
LOG_INT([a isEqual:b]);
LOG_INT([[a absoluteURL] isEqual:[b absoluteURL]]);
LOG_ID([a absoluteURL]);
LOG_ID([b absoluteURL]);

[a isEqual:b] = 0
[[a absoluteURL] isEqual:[b absoluteURL]] = 1
[a absoluteURL] = http://vgable.com/blog
[b absoluteURL] = http://vgable.com/blog

Remember that collections use isEqual: to determine equality, so you may have to convert an NSURL to an absoluteURL to get the behavior you expect, especially with NSSet and NSDictionary.

Comments (1)

Getting the Current URL from a WebView

Filed under: Cocoa,iPhone,MacOSX,Objective-C,Programming,Sample Code | JavaScript, Multilingual, UIWebView, WebView
― Vincent Gable on April 22, 2009

UPDATED 2009-04-30: WARNING: this method will not always give the correct result. +[NSURL URLWithString:] requires it’s argument to have unicode characters %-escaped UTF8. But stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding will convert # to %23, so http://example.com/index.html#s1 would become http://example.com/index.html%23s1. Unfortunately, the two URLs are not equivalent. The un-%-escaped one refers to section #s1 in the file index.html, and the other tries to fetch the file index.html#s1 (“index dot html#s1”). I have not yet implemented a workaround, although I suspect one is possible, by building the NSURL out of bits of the JavaScript location object, rather then trying to convert the whole string.

UIWebView/WebView does not provide a way to find the URL of the webpage it is showing. But there’s a simple (and neat) way to get it using embedded JavaScript.

- (NSString *)stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:(NSString *)script

Is a deceptively powerful method that can execute dynamically constructed JavaScript, and lets you embed JavaScript snippets in Cocoa programs. We can use it to embed one line of JavaScript to ask a UIWebView for the URL it’s showing.

@interface UIWebView (CurrentURLInfo)
- (NSURL*) locationURL;
@end

@implementation UIWebView (CurrentURLInfo)
- (NSURL*) locationURL;
{
	NSString *rawLocationString = [self stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"location.href;"];
	if(!rawLocationString)
		return nil;
	//URLWithString: needs percent escapes added or it will fail with, eg. a file:// URL with spaces or any URL with unicode.
	locationString = [locationString stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
	return [NSURL URLWithString:locationString]
}
@end

With the CurrentURLInfo category, you can do aWebView.locationURL to get the URL of the page a WebView is showing.

One last note, the

if(!rawLocationString)
	return nil;

special-case was only necessary, because [NSURL URLWithString:nil] throws an exception (rdar://6810626). But Apple has decided that this is correct behavior.

Comments (5)

April 19, 2009

Beware rangeOf NSString Operations

Filed under: Bug Bite,iPhone,Objective-C,Programming,Sample Code | C++, NSRange, NSString, Objective-C 2.0, x86
― Vincent Gable on April 19, 2009

I have repeatedly had trouble with the rageOf… NSString methods, because they return a struct. Going forward I will do more to avoid them, here are some ways I plan to do it.

Sending a message that returns a struct to nil can “return” undefined values. With small structs like NSRange, you are more likely to get {0} on Intel, compared to PowerPC and iPhone/ARM. Unfortunately, this makes nil-messaging bugs hard to detect. In my experience you will miss them when running on the simulator, even if they are 100% reproducible on an actual iPhone.

This category method has helped me avoid using -rangeOfString: dangerously,

@implementation NSString  (HasSubstring)
- (BOOL) hasSubstring:(NSString*)substring;
{
	if(IsEmpty(substring))
		return NO;
	NSRange substringRange = [self rangeOfString:substring];
	return substringRange.location != NSNotFound && substringRange.length > 0;
}
@end

I choose to define [aString hasSubstring:@""] as NO. You might prefer to throw an exception, or differentiate between @"" and nil. But I don’t think a nil string is enough error to throw an exception. And even though technically any string contains the empty string, I generally treat @"" as semantically equivalent to nil.

As I’ve said before,

A few simple guidelines can help you avoid my misfortune:

Be especially careful using of any objective-C method that returns a double, struct, or long long
Don’t write methods that return a double, struct, orlong long. Return an object instead of a struct; an NSNumber* or float instead of a double or long long. If you must return a dangerous data type, then see if you can avoid it. There really isn’t a good reason to return a struct, except for efficiency. And when micro-optimizations like that matter, it makes more sense to write that procedure in straight-C, which avoids the overhead of Objective-C message-passing, and solves the undefined-return-value problem.
But if you absolutely must return a dangerous data type, then return it in a parameter. That way you can give it a default value of your choice, and won’t have undefined values if an object is unexpectedly nil.
Bad:
- (struct CStructure) evaluateThings;
Good:
- (void) resultOfEvaluatingThings:(struct CStructure*)result;.

It’s not a bad idea to wrap up all the rangeOf methods in functions or categories that play safer with nil.

Thanks to Greg Parker for corrections!

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