Alex Rivera | Logout

What does @"some string" mean in objective-c?

Asked 2009-06-06T23:53:55.390
9

I'm just starting out with iphone development and ran across some example code that used @"somestring"

someLabel.txt = @"string of text";

Why does the string need the '@'? I'm guessing it's some kind of shortcut for creating an object?

Edit
Report

1 Answer

-3

Just an interesting side note... NSString literals created by using the @"..." notation are not autoreleased. They essentially just hang around until your program terminates.

Just a caution that if you want to maintain control over whether or not this object gets released (freed) down the road you may want to consider using something like:

[NSString stringWithString:@"..."]; 

...instead. This would create an autoreleased version of the same string that will be freed from memory next time the "autorelease pool is drained".

Just food for thought.

Cheers-

answered 2009-06-07T08:26:58.857

Your Answer