Retrive Core Data objects with case-insensitive comparison

Jun 1, 2012 · Follow on Twitter and Mastodon

ios

I’m currently building an iOS app that uses core data for data persistency. It works great, but as I started retrieving entities by name, I noticed that they arrived in a strange order:

Object 1
Object 3
object 2

There is probably some case-sensitive sorting issue showing its ugly face, right. This is the code I used to sort the data:

NSSortDescriptor *sortDescriptor = [[NSSortDescriptor alloc] 
    initWithKey:@"name" 
    ascending:YES
];

The solution was to add selector to the sort, like this:

NSSortDescriptor *sortDescriptor = [[NSSortDescriptor alloc] 
    initWithKey:@"name" 
    ascending:YES 
    selector:@selector(caseInsensitiveCompare:)
];

And voilá - the list will now look like this:

Object 1
object 2
Object 3

This also works for local-specific characters, like Swedish å, ä and ö.