Shortcuts in Objective-C to concatenate NSStrings

Question

Are there any shortcuts to (stringByAppendingString:) string concatenation in Objective-C, or shortcuts for working with NSString in general?

Answer 1

Macro:

// stringConcat(...)
//     A shortcut for concatenating strings (or objects' string representations).
//     Input: Any number of non-nil NSObjects.
//     Output: All arguments concatenated together into a single NSString.

#define stringConcat(...) \
    [@[__VA_ARGS__] componentsJoinedByString:@""]

Test Cases:

- (void)testStringConcat {
    NSString *actual;

    actual = stringConcat(); //might not make sense, but it's still a valid expression.
    STAssertEqualObjects(@"", actual, @"stringConcat");

    actual = stringConcat(@"A");
    STAssertEqualObjects(@"A", actual, @"stringConcat");

    actual = stringConcat(@"A", @"B");
    STAssertEqualObjects(@"AB", actual, @"stringConcat");

    actual = stringConcat(@"A", @"B", @"C");
    STAssertEqualObjects(@"ABC", actual, @"stringConcat");

    // works on all NSObjects (not just strings):
    actual = stringConcat(@1, @" ", @2, @" ", @3);
    STAssertEqualObjects(@"1 2 3", actual, @"stringConcat");
}

---

Alternate macro: (if you wanted to enforce a minimum number of arguments)

// stringConcat(...)
//     A shortcut for concatenating strings (or objects' string representations).
//     Input: Two or more non-nil NSObjects.
//     Output: All arguments concatenated together into a single NSString.

#define stringConcat(str1, str2, ...) \
    [@[ str1, str2, ##__VA_ARGS__] componentsJoinedByString:@""];