[parallax]

Few questions:

If I find documentation on GNUstep, can this serve as documentation for Cocoa? They seem to have the same classes, methods, &c.

Where can I find a tutorial on building an application in Cocoa that's not the Vermont Recipes? Do you recommend I learn it any other way?

How can I convert a "char buf[1000]" to an NSString?

Thanks.

[Dalgo]

Read Apple's documentation. In NSString you can use

+ (id)stringWithCString const char *)cString length unsigned)length

to convert a character array to an NSString Object. I don't think that you can just give it an array I think that you must give it a pointer to the array so instead of statically creating the character array do something like:

char *buf;
buf = (char*)malloc(sizeof(char)*1000);

I'd reccommend against using character arrays at all. You should use unichar instead of char. Char is usually only 1 byte unichar is two or more. Without unichar your program can't support languages like Japanese. To convert a unichar array to an NSString object you'll want to use the method:

+ (id)stringWithCharacters const unichar *)chars length unsigned)length

But... the moral of this little exercise is that all of this is in Apple's documentation and you could have looked it up yourself.

[This message has been edited by Dalgo (edited 01-22-2001).]

[parallax]

Terribly sorry :-)

The problem is, I wrote some UNIX programs, and I want to give them a Cocoa front-end just so they're easier to use, but it would be mighty cumbersome to convert all of the character arrays to NSStrings within the code.

Now what about the other stuff? Is GNUstep the same (pretty much?)

[eyadams]

From the GNUStep FAQ:

> Is GNUstep following Apple's Changes to OpenStep?
>
> Yes - gstep-base already contains the documented changes
> in the Foundation library. GNUstep aims to be compatible with
> both the OpenStep specification and with MacOS-X It should be
> easy to write an application that compiles cleanly under both
> GNUstep and Yellow Box.

Based on that question and others, I would say that yes, you could use the GNUStep documentation. However, it will likely lag behind Apple's documentation.

There are tutorials included with the developer tools that include samples of developing Cocoa applications both in Obj C and Java. The Java examples are a little simplistic; I haven't looked at the Obj C examples in detail.

Others have pointed out the stringWithCString method.

[Dalgo]

If all you want to to is slap a front end onto some sort of a console based app then don't worry about converting all of your car arrays to NSString objects. Simply, when you take input, convert it from an NSString object to a character array, and then when you want to do output convert it back again. There's no problem there.

As for internationalization, you could probably do a replace all in Project Builder to convert all occurrences char to unichar. They basically behave the same way. With unichar you can still say stuff like:

if (unicharCharacter == 'a')
doSomething();

Unless you did something special that requires that your characters are explicitly char and nothing else, then I see no reason in switching to unichar. This is why if you use malloc it's good to use something like sizeof(char) in it when dynamically allocating memory, instead of assuming that char is 1 byte. If you allocated stuff with malloc and assumed that a character was one byte then you'd have to go through your code and fix it on your own.

So: Don't worry about changing lost of occurrences of char to NSString objects. Just do it on input and output.

[This message has been edited by Dalgo (edited 01-23-2001).]

[Mooseyard]

The Cocoa API documentation is pretty good; it's my major reference. Look online at http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/...coaTopics.html and follow the "framework reference" links. The same stuff's also available on disk down in /Developer/Documentation/Cocoa.
I would definitely trust this over GNUstep.