NSPredicate Exact Match with String

CoreCode picture CoreCode · Jul 22, 2012 · Viewed 51.8k times · Source

I have a NSPredicate like this:

NSPredicate *predicate = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"entity.name CONTAINS %@", myString];

But that will return anything which contains that string. For example: If my entity.name's where:

text
texttwo
textthree
randomtext

and the myString was text then all of those strings would match. I would like it so that if myString is text it would only return the first object with the name text and if myString was randomtext it would return the fourth object with the name randomtext. I am also looking for it to be case insensitive and that it ignores whitespace

Answer

Andrew Madsen picture Andrew Madsen · Jul 22, 2012

This should do it:

NSPredicate *predicate = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"entity.name LIKE[c] %@", myString];

LIKE matches strings with ? and * as wildcards. The [c] indicates that the comparison should be case insensitive.

If you don't want ? and * to be treated as wildcards, you can use == instead of LIKE:

NSPredicate *predicate = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"entity.name ==[c] %@", myString];

More info in the NSPredicate Predicate Format String Syntax documentation.