nsarray filtering

Question

Possible Duplicate:
removing duplicates in nsarray

Hi friends,

I am storing the value in nsarray and i have to remove the duplicate dates.i mean exactly like this (14/12/2010,paid,15/12/2010,pending,15/12/2010,pending,16/12/2010,paid) should be (14/12/2010,paid,15/12/2010,pending,16/12/2010,paid). can any one suggest me the best way for removing duplicates that has 2 different day in it.

Thanks in advance.

Regards, sathish

Answer 1

Use a NSSet (our NSMutableSet).

The objects in a set must respond to the NSObject protocol methods hash and isEqual: (see NSObject for more information). See the Collections Programming Topics

An other solution is to loop of each element of the array to add the element in an other array (mutable) if it is not duplicated:

NSMutableArray* filteredArray = [[NSMutableArray alloc]init];
for (id obj in array) {
  BOOL duplicated=NO;
  for (id objTest in filteredArray) {
    if ((obj.date==objTest.date) && (obj.status==objTest.status)) {
      duplicated = YES;
    }
  }
  if (duplicated==NO) {
    [filteredArray addObject:obj];
  }
}

Answer 2

You can use NSDictionary, with key = NSDate and value = status (paid/pending). When you insert any date in the dictionary, check dictionary's objectForKey: NSDate, if it returns nil, then you can insert the new date.