Newbie: Data Structure method similar to perl hashes?

[mkenney]

I'm new to Objective-C and coming from perl. In perl I used hashes to store most of the things I would do as I had a lot of key value pairs. What is a good way to store this data in Objective-C to allow it to be easily updated as well as passed from object to object. I'll list a couple of sample data here as well since I'm probably not describing this well:

ThingA 4
ThingD 1
Widget 5
Name "JimJim"

In perl I would set this up as:

my %collection=(
'ThingA'=>4,
'ThingD'=>1,
'Widget'=>5,
'Name'=>"JimJim",
);

And call a variable like:

$collection{ThingA};

Is there something similar in Object-C or PLEASE feel free to tell me a better way, I know I don't do things as cleanly as they should be and would love to learn!!!

Mark

[FlyingDiver]

You want to use NSDictionary:

NSDictionary *dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys: 
	@"4", @"ThingA",
        @"1", @"ThingD", 
        @"5", @"Widget", 
        @"JimJim", @"Name", 
        nil];

NSString *name = [dict objectForKey: @"Name"];

joe

[mkenney]

Originally Posted by FlyingDiver

You want to use NSDictionary:

NSDictionary *dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys: 
	@"4", @"ThingA",
        @"1", @"ThingD", 
        @"5", @"Widget", 
        @"JimJim", @"Name", 
        nil];

NSString *name = [dict objectForKey: @"Name"];

joe

Thanks for the info!!! Sorry for the late reply, I got hit hard by the flu