On Mar 3, 2012, at 11:28 AM, Dave Keck wrote:
> The buffer needs to remain intact until the NSString/NSData object is
> deallocated.
True; but a strict interpretation of this is that the buffer can _never_ be
destroyed, because you can never predict with 100% accuracy when an object is
going to be deallocated. (as discussed in all those “why -retainCount is
useless for debugging” threads.)
In practice I’ve tended to be more pragmatic about this, avoiding using such a
string in a situation where I know something else is going to retain it (like
setting it as a property value on an object.) In this case it was absolutely
not intuitive to me that creating a substring of the string would cause the
original string to be retained; that’s a tricky optimization practiced by this
particular implementation and I shouldn’t have to know about it.
> I suppose this scenario reinforces that if your method is passed a
> NSString/NSData object and you need to keep it around longer than the
> current stack frame, then you must copy the string/data object.
Yes. I try to follow that, myself (and for arrays/dictionaries/sets as well).
It’s usually not any more expensive, since an immutable Foundation object
responds to -copy by just calling -retain.
There’s a parallel with mutable strings: If I create a mutable string and do
stuff with it, when am I subsequently allowed to modify the contents without
breaking things? We could rewrite my example this way:
NSMutableString* str = [NSMutableString stringWithString: @“I HAZ A
STRING”];
NSString* substr = [str substringWithRange: NSMakeRange(2, 3)];
[str setString: @“************”];
NSLog(@“substr = %@“, substr];
In this case it’s pretty obvious that substr should still be “HAZ”, not “***”.
-substringWithRange: knows that it can’t create a pointer into the receiver’s
buffer because its contents might change later. I’d argue that the same is true
of the original example, that the string should know that the caller might
release it and then invalidate the buffer.
(BTW: Someone on the GNUstep mailing list just looked into Apple's CF source
code and confirmed that CFStringCreateSubstring always copies the bytes.)
—Jens
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