Tag Archives: Swift

Simplifying NSJSONSerialization in Swift

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Josh Smith

While writing a pet project app in Swift I put together this convenience function that simplifies converting an NSData into JSON objects via the NSJSONSerialization class. My JSONObjectWithData function adds a Swift-friendly API on top of the Foundation method of the same name. Here is … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Nil-coalescing Operator in Swift

Posted on July 24, 2014 by Josh Smith

Update: As of Xcode 6 Beta 5 this article is obsolete. Swift now includes a nil coalescing operator (??). I am leaving this article on my blog for people who are curious about why such an operator exists or when … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged , | 21 Comments

Custom Threading Operator in Swift

Posted on July 5, 2014 by Josh Smith

The Swift language supports custom operator functions, similar to operator overloading in C++. This kind of language feature has been known to enable overly “enthusiastic” developers to create a quagmire of unreadable code, which is why I was surprised to see … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged , , | 16 Comments

Understanding Swift’s reduce Method

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Josh Smith

Swift’s API includes many functions and instance methods that reflect its functional programming heritage. A prime example is called reduce.  You can reduce a collection of values down to just one value, such as calculating the sum of every person’s age in an array of … Continue reading →

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Create a Swift Dictionary from an Array

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Josh Smith

Here is a Gist I posted showing a Swift utility function that enables you to create a Dictionary containing an optional entry for every element in an Array. It uses the reduce function to create one Dictionary from every element in … Continue reading →

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Cross-join two Swift arrays

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Josh Smith

Here is a Gist I just published on GitHub of a utility function that performs a cross-join between two Swift arrays. This allows you to iterate over one array for every element in another array, and return an optional value built for … Continue reading →

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Randomly shuffle a Swift array

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Josh Smith

I just posted a Gist on GitHub that shows how to add a shuffle method to Swift’s Array class, which randomizes the order of an array’s elements. My shuffle method relies on the arc4random function, which means that the file containing that extension … Continue reading →

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Curried Functions in Swift

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Josh Smith

Apple’s programming language Swift includes several features commonly used in functional programming but unheard of in more mainstream languages. This blog post explores the lesser-known feature known as curried functions. I first encountered currying when studying the functional language Haskell, … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged , | 19 Comments