How to decipher “objc_method_description” from protocol method description list?

Question

I have some Swift 3 code to decode an iOS Objective-C protocol (which has a Swift counterpart). After concluding Swift 3 reflection was not developed enough to accomplish what I

Answer 1

What is returned objc_method_description.type field?

• A method signature encoding scheme
• ... which includes an obsolete stack offset representation

In other words, to get a usable method signature encoding from the type field, just just extract the alpha-symbolic characters in left-to-right order discarding the digits.

Supporting documentation:

• Objective-C Method Signature Type Encoding
• Meaning of the numeric elements in signature encoding, explained by an Apple developer
• Playing around with Type Encodings
• class_addmethod (according to @Richard_J_Ross, this is the root of it)
• Objective-C Runtime Programming Guide
• Objective-C Runtime Reference

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