Selectors in Objective C

Question

First, I'm not sure I really understand what a selector is. From my understanding, it's a name of a method, and you can assign it to a class of type 'SEL' and then run methods such as respondToSelector to see if the receiver implements that method. Can someone offer up a better explanation?

Secondly, to this point, I have the following code:

NSString *string = @"Hello, this is Craig";

SEL sel = @selector(lowercaseString:);
NSString *lower = (([thing respondsToSelector:sel]) ? @"YES" : @"NO");
NSLog (@"Responds to lowercaseString: %@", lower);
if ([thing respondsToSelector:sel]) //(lower == @"YES")
    NSLog(@"lowercaseString is: %@", [thing lowercaseString]);

However, even though 'string is clearly a kind of NSString, and should respond to lowercaseString, I cannot get the 'respondsToSelector' conditional to return "YES"...

Answer 1

You want to read Introduction to The Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language , especially Selectors.

Answer 2

In this case, the name of the selector is wrong. The colon here is part of the method signature; it means that the method takes one argument. I believe that you want

SEL sel = @selector(lowercaseString);

Answer 3

You have to be very careful about the method names. In this case, the method name is just "lowercaseString", not "lowercaseString:" (note the absence of the colon). That's why you're getting NO returned, because NSString objects respond to the lowercaseString message but not the lowercaseString: message.

How do you know when to add a colon? You add a colon to the message name if you would add a colon when calling it, which happens if it takes one argument. If it takes zero arguments (as is the case with lowercaseString), then there is no colon. If it takes more than one argument, you have to add the extra argument names along with their colons, as in compare:options:range:locale:.

You can also look at the documentation and note the presence or absence of a trailing colon.

Answer 4

NSString's method is lowercaseString (0 arguments), not lowercaseString: (1 argument).

Answer 5

That's because you want @selector(lowercaseString), not @selector(lowercaseString:). There's a subtle difference: the second one implies a parameter (note the colon at the end), but - [NSString lowercaseString] does not take a parameter.

Answer 6

Selectors are an efficient way to reference methods directly in compiled code - the compiler is what actually assigns the value to a SEL.

Other have already covered the second part of your q, the ':' at the end matches a different signature than what you're looking for (in this case that signature doesn't exist).

Answer 7

Don't think of the colon as part of the function name, think of it as a separator, if you don't have anything to separate (no value to go with the function) then you don't need it.

I'm not sure why but all this OO stuff seems to be foreign to Apple developers. I would strongly suggest grabbing Visual Studio Express and playing around with that too. Not because one is better than the other, just it's a good way to look at the design issues and ways of thinking.

Like

introspection = reflection
+ before functions/properties = static
- = instance level

It's always good to look at a problem in different ways and programming is the ultimate puzzle.