instance variable going out of scope

Question

I have an NSString which has been declared as property and being allocated and initialised in view did load as below:

NSString *textWithKey;
@property(nonatomic,retain)NSString *textWithKey; 

in .m i have

@synthesize textWithKey;

and in viewDidLoad i have

self.textWithKey=[[NSString alloc]init];
    self.textWithKey=@"";

Now somewhere in my code i am using

self.textWithKey=[self.textWithKey stringByAppendingString:text1];

it works fine untill another method is called which returns different values. and from there on this perticularline is called again but debugger shows textWithKey out of scope.I have not released textWihKey any where.

Answer 1

Yes that's right. You did not release it. But you also didn't allocate it. ;-) At first you called self.textWithKey = [[NSString alloc] init]. Than you call self.textWithKey = @"". Because you use the setters for the property, the old assigned value is released every time. Try the following:

self.textWithKey = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:@""];

Because

self.textWithKey = @"";

is the same as

self.textWithKey = [NSString stringWithString:@""];

And there you don't allocate anything. ;-)

Answer 2

Variables going out of scope are not the same as being released.