How can I make an NSDictionary contain a selector as one of its values?

Question

This code is in a UITableViewController subclass viewDidLoad method. The UITableViewController subclass contains a test method.

It crashes without throwing an exception.

id dict = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] initWithObjectsAndKeys: @"some text", @"text", @selector(test), @"selector", nil]

Answer 1

Use NSValue to wrap the selector:

// Set selector
SEL inSelector = @selector(something:);
NSValue *selectorAsValue = [NSValue valueWithBytes:&inSelector objCType:@encode(SEL)];
id dict = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] initWithObjectsAndKeys:@"some text", @"text", selectorAsValue, @"selector", nil];

// Retrieve selector
SEL outSelector;
[(NSValue *)[dict objectForKey:@"selector"] getValue:&selector];
// outSelector can now be used as a selector, e.g. [self performSelector:outSelector]

Answer 2

pix0r's solution is good, but I usually prefer to use strings because they're more resilient to serialization and make the dictionary easier to read in debug output.

// Set selector
SEL inSelector = @selector(something:);
NSString *selectorAsString = NSStringFromSelector(inSelector);
id dict = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] initWithObjectsAndKeys:@"some text", @"text", selectorAsString, @"selector", nil];

// Retrieve selector
SEL outSelector = NSSelectorFromString([dict objectForKey:@"selector"]);