> On Oct 14, 2015, at 6:36 PM, Shane Stanley <sstan...@myriad-com.com.au> wrote: > > On 15 Oct 2015, at 4:02 AM, David Duncan <david.dun...@apple.com > <mailto:david.dun...@apple.com>> wrote: >> >> The helpful followup is that it is generally encouraged to use empty >> containers (@[] or @{}) over nil when there is no semantic difference, as is >> the case for the aforementioned API. > > OK, but the docs still say: "The dictionary contains values from Document > Types and must at least contain NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute." That > suggests to me that an empty dictionary is not allowed.
The docs and headers for NSAttributedString contain a lot of copy/paste stuff, which I think is part of the problem. The bit you quoted is copied directly from the description for -[NSAttributedString dataFromRange:documentAttribute:error:], which notably does *not* contain the bit about nil being allowed for the dictionary. This is because this method returns data in an unspecified format, so if you don’t provide the dictionary and specify a document type attribute, there is no way that it can know what to do. For the type-specific variants of this method, like docFormatFromRange:bla:bla: and RTFFromRange:bla:bla:, the output document format is known, so NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute isn’t really necessary, and indeed, if you supply it, it seems to be ignored. So, the documentation contains a note here that the dictionary can be nil—and if you try it, it works fine. So, to my mind, it makes sense for dataFromRange:bla:bla: to have a non-optional attributes parameter, and for the rest of them to have an optional one. But even if you don’t agree, the bottom line is that something needs to be changed, whether that be the headers or the documentation, since the documentation does say that it can be nil. Charles _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
