Chapter 8. Text in Cocoa
In spite of the complex graphical capabilities of OS X, most applications still spend a lot of their time processing text. Cocoa provides several classes for doing this, collectively known as the text system.
Text processing is a surprisingly complex activity. Even displaying a simple string on the screen involves several steps. First, what is a string? In C, it’s a sequence of bytes. Everything inside the computer is a sequence of bytes, so that’s a good place to start. For sequences of bytes to have any meaning as text, you need the concept of character sets. When you load a text file, it will be in a character set like UTF-8 or Mac OS Roman. Internally, it will probably be converted into UTF-32. Now the sequence of ...
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