Recently on twitter I asked about enumerating over the lines of a string concurrently using a block. I couldn't see an API to deal with this issue directly. If you look through the Mac OS X 10.6 SDK you'll see this
- (void)enumerateLinesUsingBlock:(void (^)(NSString *line, BOOL *stop))blockWhich is a synchronous operation processing each line ( the components separated by \n ) one by one until you've gone through the whole thing. However, this doesn't work if you want to go through the lines concurrently, but make the operation as a whole (not proceeding on until all the lines have been processed) synchronous. Steve Streza came up with a solution that I should have thought of, but didn't seem obvious at the time till I saw the solution.
[[myString componentsSeparatedByString:@"\n"] enumerateObjectsWithOptions:NSEnumerationConcurrent
usingBlock:^(id obj, NSUInteger idx, BOOL *stop) {
NSString *line = (NSString *)obj;
//do what your going to do with line...A minor hack, but it works and isn't incredibly inconvenient. Still I wish Apple would make this API
- (void)enumerateLinesWithOptions:(NSStringEnumerationOptions)option usingBlock:(void (^)(NSString *line, BOOL *stop))block
[myString enumerateLinesWithOptions:NSEnumerationConcurrent usingBlock:^(NSString *line, BOOL *stop){
//do stuff with the line...I was also asked why I didn't do something like
[stringArray enumateLinesUsingBlock:^{ dispatch_async(myQueue, ^{
And the reason is simple, while that would technically work, i'd not know when the operation as a whole was completed. You would really want to use a dispatch_group so you could dispatch all the blocks and then get notified when they are all completed. However the solution above works with a minimal of fuss and the operation as a whole is synchronous while the line processing is asynchronous. We could do the same thing other ways, but overall we'd be writing a lot more code for really no benefit.
