Programming in Swift - Part 38: Part 4: Collections: | Ray Wenderlich

[rwenderlich]

Let's review what you learned in this section, and discuss what's next.

---

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.raywenderlich.com/3535-programming-in-swift/lessons/38

[ohene]

Hi all,

It seems to me like the code for accessing characters in a string in this style seems a little long. I was digging through the Swift documentation and found that you could cast the string as an array and then use normal index syntax like so:

let thirdChar = Array(cafeCombining)[2]

Does this produce the same results and also do you take any optimization hits if you do it this way? Thanks.

[rwenderlich]

As I understand it this method may work but a) is inefficient as it requires a new array to be allocated with the same contents as the string, and b) doesn’t use Apple’s recommended APIs so I’m a bit suspicious of this approach.

For more info find these posts:

• Simpler String slicing in Swift 4 - Stack Overflow
• Get nth character of a string in Swift programming language - Stack Overflow

[ohene]

Oh interesting. So it appears that the compiler does it much quicker using swift’s recommended API. Those links are were very helpful. Thanks!