NSScanner

Among Cocoa’s tools, NSScanner serves as a wrapper around a string, scanning through its contents to efficiently retrieve substrings and numeric values. It offers several properties that modify an NSScanner instance’s behavior.

→ nshipster.com/nsscanner/

NSScanner wraps a string to pull out substrings and numbers. It has properties like caseSensitive (for matches), charactersToBeSkipped (ignores chars), scanLocation (current position), locale (for numbers).

Methods scan for strings or numbers, return true if found, fill a pointer: scanString/scanCharactersFromSet (exact match), scanUpToString/scanUpToCharactersFromSet (until match), scanDouble/Float/etc. (numbers), scanHex (hex values).

Use localizedScannerWithString or set locale for region-specific parsing.

Example: Parse SVG paths by skipping commas/whitespace, scanning commands/points for UIBezierPath.

NSScanner suits mixed strings; pick tools like regex or NSDataDetector for patterns or dates.