19 Feb 2019   workflow


NSPredicate’s predicateWithFormat method takes a va_list of arguments, so it’s not possible to pass an array to your format string. But, the same result can be achieved by combining multiple NSPredicates together using an NSCompoundPredicate:

Given a space-separated array of search words:

NSArray<NSString*> *words = [@"my search terms" componentsSeparatedByString:@" "];

You can combine them by first creating multiple predicates:

NSMutableArray<NSPredicate *> *predicates = [NSMutableArray new];
for (NSString *word in words) {
  NSPredicate *predicate = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"attribute CONTAINS[cd] %@", word];
  [predicates addObject:predicate];
}

And finally create one NSPredicate via NSCompoundPredicate

NSPredicate *finalPredicate =
        [NSCompoundPredicate andPredicateWithSubpredicates:predicates];
πŸ„