Strip Non-Alphanumeric Characters from an NSString

cocoa cocoa-touch nsstring nscharacterset
Jeff Kelley picture Jeff Kelley · Nov 1, 2009 · Viewed 33.2k times · Source

I'm looking for a quick and easy way to strip non-alphanumeric characters from an NSString. Probably something using an NSCharacterSet, but I'm tired and nothing seems to return a string containing only the alphanumeric characters in a string.

Answer

user102008 picture user102008 · Jul 2, 2011

We can do this by splitting and then joining. Requires OS X 10.5+ for the componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:

NSCharacterSet *charactersToRemove = [[NSCharacterSet alphanumericCharacterSet] invertedSet];
NSString *strippedReplacement = [[someString componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:charactersToRemove] componentsJoinedByString:@""];

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