Extracting data(strings) from a string large string

A long time ago I had to extract data from a string, and I went with a while loop that went through the whole string char by char extracting bits of data that I need. It wasn't very efficient but it worked.

In my latest app I would like to try and do it in the way that a good engineer would d开发者_开发百科o it. Are there ways to search the string for an expression? or a sub string maybe?

For example out of the html in the string, there is a line that will contain a team name.

<td width="25%"><span class="teamname">Blue Bombers</span></td>

Is there a call I can do that would find the "teamname" and then extract the teamname from between the > <.

I could go char by char saving the last 10 chars to a string until the string equals "teamname", then keep going until i hit the > save everything i get until i again hit a <. but i guess thats taking the easy inefficient way.

Many Thanks -Code

You can get the range of string "class" using NSRange, then do your logic... it will probably reduce the character searching..

Your code should be like follows,

if ([substring rangeOfString:@"class"].location != NSNotFound) {
    // "class" was found
else {
    // "class" was not found
}

If that's the only part of the string you're interested in and then just find a starting point like "teamname" via -rangeOfString:. If there's more than one occurrence then make repeated calls with -rageOfString:options:range:.

If you need more comprehensive parsing, however..

If this string is actual XHTML then you may be able to use one of the various XML parsers, e.g. TouchXML, and then find what you need via DOM lookups. However if (as seems likely) it's not pure XHTML then this is unlikely to help. In that case you might try loading up the HTML in an offscreen UIWebView and using JavaScript calls to find specific elements.