method with 2 return values

Question

I want to call a method which returns two values

basically lets say my method is like the below (want to return 2 values)

NSString* myfunc
{
   NSString          


        

Answer 1

You can only return 1 value. That value can be a struct or an object or a simple type. If you return a struct or object it can contain multiple values.

The other way to return multiple values is with out parameters. Pass by reference or pointer in C.

Here is a code snippet showing how you could return a struct containing two NSStrings:

typedef struct {
    NSString* str1;
    NSString* str2;
} TwoStrings;

TwoStrings myfunc(void) {
    TwoStrings result;
    result.str1 = @"data";
    result.str2 = @"more";
    return result;
}

And call it like this:

TwoStrings twoStrs = myfunc();
NSLog(@"str1 = %@, str2 = %@", twoStrs.str1, twoStrs.str2);

You need to be careful with memory management when returning pointers even if they are wrapped inside a struct. In Objective-C the convention is that functions return autoreleased objects (unless the method name starts with create/new/alloc/copy).