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Retrive Core Data objects with case-insensitive comparison

Jun 1, 2012 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.