How to parse a multiline response from ASIHTTPRequest and load data into a UITableView?

Question

I am trying to build a simple chat module in my iOS application. Right now, the application can send messages, which are handled by a PHP file and saved onto a database.

When trying to retrieve messages from the DB to display, the server returns a response of the most 10 recent messages in the following format

msgid|userid|timestamp|message

Note that these values are separated by a | character.

So a sample response from my server would be as follows

12|123|2013-03-02 09:15:16|Hey. How are you?
13|12|2013-03-02 09:17:31|Hey Matt. I'm good!
14|123|2013-03-02 09:18:02|That's great!

I need to load this response into TableViewCells, but I'm not sure how to go about parsing the response and saving the data locally.

I am newbie to iOS dev and I'd appreciate the help.

Thanks!

Answer 1

If there is a newline character after each message maybe you could use the NSString method:

- (NSArray *)componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:(NSCharacterSet *)separator

So:

NSArray *tableViewCellDataArray = [responseString componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet newlineCharacterSet]];

If your response is in the format NSData, you can get an NSString by using:

NSString *responseString = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:responseData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

As for storing the data, you can store it in an NSArray property, or if you want persistent storage, investigate Core Data or NSUserDefaults.