What is the maximum length of NSString? Alternative to NSString - iPhone

Question

-(void)connectionDidFinishLoading:(NSURLConnection *)connection {
    NSString *theXML = [[NSString alloc] initWithBytes: [myWebData mutableBytes] length:[myWebData length] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
    NSLog(@"%@",theXML); 
    [self actualString:theXML 
      extractMyData:@"<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?><soap:Envelope xmlns:soap=\"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/\" xmlns:xsi=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\" xmlns:xsd=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema\"&gt;&lt;soap:Body&gt;&lt;GetCategoryResponse xmlns=\"http://tempuri.org/\"&gt;&lt;GetCategoryResult&gt;"
      endingString:@"</GetCategoryResult></GetCategoryResponse></soap:Body></soap:Envelope>" 
      emptyString:@"<Prop_Category />"];
    [theXML writeToFile:[self GetMyFilePath] atomically:YES encoding:NSStringEncodingConversionAllowLossy error:nil];
    [theXML release];
}

-(NSArray*)actualString:(NSString*)theXML extractMyData:(NSString*)prefixString endingString:(NSString*)suffixString emptyString:(NSString*)noDataFromXMLString{
    // now here I want to extract data from string
    // from theXML
}

-(NSString*)GetMyFilePath{
    NSArray *paths=NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory,NSUserDomainMask,YES);
    NSString *documentDirectory=[paths objectAtIndex:0];
    NSString *pathToUserCopyofplist=[documentDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"myWebServiceData.plist"];
    NSLog(@"%@",pathToUserCopyofplist);
    return pathToUserCopyofplist;
}

I want to save to response of asp.net web service in a plist file.

But sometimes, when response may be in a huge size. In such situation connection has received data more then 50,000 bytes. & When I NSlogs NSString - it prints (null).

In this case I cann't store web service response to the file.

What should be solution for this? Is there any alternate way of NSString? (for this purpose)

Thanks in advance.

Sagar.

Answer 1

If you want to store something, you already have the bytes: [myWebData mutableBytes]

Answer 2

It's a mobile device, remember. Memory is extremely limited and when you say that you might want to allocate more than 500000 bytes, it throws a red flag for me. This is going to be an issue for you with this design.

Consider coming up with a streaming or chunk algorithm if the file size is over n. Maybe your web service can break the response up into parts of a reasonable (and known maximum) size and the device and write them to the file as it receives them?