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[XCHG]

Originally Posted by AndrewSpeaksOut

I'm trying to take the text typed or pasted into a searchbar and remove all punctuation and separate each individual word and place it in an array. This is as close as I've gotten but there are a lot of empty entries in the array where the punctuation was.

NSString *sourceData = source.text;
NSString *filteredData = [[sourceData componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:[[NSCharacterSet letterCharacterSet] invertedSet]] componentsJoinedByString:@"_"];
NSArray *components = [filteredData componentsSeparatedByString:@"_"];

There must be a better way of doing this. I need a very efficient way.

You can do it this way which is much more efficient:

NSString *Source = @"Bla1;' Bla2#^ Bla3";
  NSCharacterSet *AcceptedCharacterSet = [[NSCharacterSet alphanumericCharacterSet] invertedSet];
  Source = [[Source componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:AcceptedCharacterSet] componentsJoinedByString:@" "];
  NSArray *Words = [Source componentsSeparatedByString:@" "];
  int WordCounter = 0;
  for (WordCounter = 0; WordCounter < [Words count]; WordCounter++){
    NSLog(@"%@", [Words objectAtIndex:WordCounter]);
  }

This outputs:

Bla1
Bla2
Bla3