I was asked to write a blog which documents my journey to discovering Objective-C

… and that’s pretty much how I feel right now.

Heard of a dictionary?

Something like that. I’m talking about an NSDictionary, which stores objects by key-value pairs.

If that isn’t English enough for you, we have a unique key that points to a value, and save that.

First, lets start with creating one. The standard way to alloc / init

NSDictionary *myDict1 = [[NSDictionary alloc] init];

Second, create one with a literal (if you know what values you want inside)

NSDictionary *myDict2 = @{@"british": @"british English", @"american":@"american English"};

Third, my favorite-

NSDictionary *myDict3 = [NSDictionary dictionary];

please note that the first & third dictionaries will be empty!

Next lets see how we can pull things out of our dictionary.

NSString *murica = [myDict2 objectForKey:@"american"];

so our string name ‘murica’ now is equal to @”american English”

For our friends in the United Kingdom,

NSString *uk = myDict2[@"british"];

so the string name ‘uk’ is now equal to @”british English”.

Remember when I mentioned earlier that dictionaries hold objects? They really do!

That means dictionaries can hold other dictionaries. Is your mind blown? Mine is..

lets look at this in detail:

NSDictionary *muppets = @{@"Muppets":@{@"Kermit":@"the frog"}, @{@"Statler":@"the sleepy old dude that complains and hates"}, @{@"Waldorf":@"the mean looking old dude that complains and hates"}, @{@"Fozzie":@"a bear that makes awful jokes"}}

so for our dictionary Muppets, we are holding the keys ‘Kermit’, ‘Statler’, ‘Waldorf’, and ‘Fozzie’, with their respective values.

For accessing the objects within the dictionary, here is a short project
https://github.com/FullMetalFist/PlayingWithDictionaries

there is more than one way to access the values in the dictionary “theDict”

someMuricanWord = [[theDict objectForKey:@"american"] objectForKey:@"airplane"];
someBritWord = theDict[@"british"][@"behaviour"];

easy like a sunday morning, right?

Sources:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSDictionary_Class/Reference/Reference.html

http://rypress.com/tutorials/objective-c/data-types/nsdictionary.html