I never cared about the lack of regex support personally, although I
understand that people do use them. As far as a blessed solution goes,
"man regex" gives you a library that's in libSystem and is part of
POSIX, so it's as supported as you can get.
And (as discussed a few weeks ago) it's not Unicode-savvy, which could
bite the unwary developer in the ass, especially when attempting to
localize their app into non-Roman languages like Japanese.
I do this with a fair amount of regularity. NSString is unsuitable for
working with data whose encoding is unknown or doubtful, and NSData
doesn't have any string-like functionality, so the standard C str
functions can be very useful here.
Ouch. The problem with those is that, every time you call one, you've
added a potential buffer overrun bug to your app. And if the data in
the string came from an untrusted source like the network, that
escalates to a potential security vulnerability.
Also, speaking of doubtful encodings, the regular C string functions
will fail quite badly on 16-bit character encodings, where it's more
than likely that every other byte is a zero.
My general tactic when dealing with unknown data whose encoding can't
be determined is to just fall back on CP-1252 [though Aki Inoue
suggested MacRoman], both of which are supersets of ascii that map
every byte to a character. That way you'll always get a non-nil
NSString, and any ascii text in the original will come out unscathed.
That's a better result than you'll get with C string APIs.
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