Finding index of character in Swift String

by

You are not the only one who couldn’t find the solution.

String doesn’t implement RandomAccessIndexType. Probably because they enable characters with different byte lengths. That’s why we have to use string.characters.count (count or countElements in Swift 1.x) to get the number of characters. That also applies to positions. The _position is probably an index into the raw array of bytes and they don’t want to expose that. The String.Index is meant to protect us from accessing bytes in the middle of characters.

That means that any index you get must be created from String.startIndex or String.endIndex (String.Index implements BidirectionalIndexType). Any other indices can be created using successor or predecessor methods.

Now to help us with indices, there is a set of methods (functions in Swift 1.x):

Swift 4.x

let text = "abc"
let index2 = text.index(text.startIndex, offsetBy: 2) //will call succ 2 times
let lastChar: Character = text[index2] //now we can index!

let characterIndex2 = text.index(text.startIndex, offsetBy: 2)
let lastChar2 = text[characterIndex2] //will do the same as above

let range: Range<String.Index> = text.range(of: "b")!
let index: Int = text.distance(from: text.startIndex, to: range.lowerBound)

Swift 3.0

let text = "abc"
let index2 = text.index(text.startIndex, offsetBy: 2) //will call succ 2 times
let lastChar: Character = text[index2] //now we can index!

let characterIndex2 = text.characters.index(text.characters.startIndex, offsetBy: 2)
let lastChar2 = text.characters[characterIndex2] //will do the same as above

let range: Range<String.Index> = text.range(of: "b")!
let index: Int = text.distance(from: text.startIndex, to: range.lowerBound)

Swift 2.x

let text = "abc"
let index2 = text.startIndex.advancedBy(2) //will call succ 2 times
let lastChar: Character = text[index2] //now we can index!
let lastChar2 = text.characters[index2] //will do the same as above

let range: Range<String.Index> = text.rangeOfString("b")!
let index: Int = text.startIndex.distanceTo(range.startIndex) //will call successor/predecessor several times until the indices match

Swift 1.x

let text = "abc"
let index2 = advance(text.startIndex, 2) //will call succ 2 times
let lastChar: Character = text[index2] //now we can index!

let range = text.rangeOfString("b")
let index: Int = distance(text.startIndex, range.startIndex) //will call succ/pred several times

Working with String.Index is cumbersome but using a wrapper to index by integers (see https://stackoverflow.com/a/25152652/669586) is dangerous because it hides the inefficiency of real indexing.

Note that Swift indexing implementation has the problem that indices/ranges created for one string cannot be reliably used for a different string, for example:

Swift 2.x

let text: String = "abc"
let text2: String = "🎾🏇🏈"

let range = text.rangeOfString("b")!

//can randomly return a bad substring or throw an exception
let substring: String = text2[range]

//the correct solution
let intIndex: Int = text.startIndex.distanceTo(range.startIndex)
let startIndex2 = text2.startIndex.advancedBy(intIndex)
let range2 = startIndex2...startIndex2

let substring: String = text2[range2]

Swift 1.x

let text: String = "abc"
let text2: String = "🎾🏇🏈"

let range = text.rangeOfString("b")

//can randomly return nil or a bad substring 
let substring: String = text2[range] 

//the correct solution
let intIndex: Int = distance(text.startIndex, range.startIndex)    
let startIndex2 = advance(text2.startIndex, intIndex)
let range2 = startIndex2...startIndex2

let substring: String = text2[range2]

More Related Contents:

  1. Leading zeros for Int in Swift
  2. Convert Int to String in Swift
  3. Convert String to Float in Swift
  4. How can I concatenate multiple optional strings in swift 3.0?
  5. Generate random alphanumeric string in Swift
  6. swift How to remove optional String Character
  7. How do I concatenate strings in Swift?
  8. How to convert “Index” to type “Int” in Swift?
  9. How should I remove all the leading spaces from a string? – swift
  10. How to use stringByAddingPercentEncodingWithAllowedCharacters() for a URL in Swift 2.0
  11. From String to NSDate in Swift
  12. Does swift have a trim method on String?
  13. Swift, Strings and Memory Addresses
  14. Is there a way to create a String from utf16 array in swift?
  15. Swift: Convert enum value to String?
  16. Remove last character from string. Swift language
  17. Swift – Split string over multiple lines
  18. Remove all line breaks at the beginning of a string in Swift
  19. How do I find the last occurrence of a substring in a Swift string?
  20. Why does my string not match when reading user input from stdin?
  21. Find string between two substrings [duplicate]
  22. Find out if Character in String is emoji?
  23. How can I split multiple joined words?
  24. How to efficiently concatenate strings in go
  25. String compare in Perl with “eq” vs “==” [duplicate]
  26. Extract part of a string using bash/cut/split
  27. Convert R vector to string vector of 1 element [duplicate]
  28. Algorithm to find articles with similar text
  29. How to split filename from file extension in Swift?
  30. Convert slice of string to slice of pointer to string

Leave a Comment