“Expected method body” error

Question

I had my application working fine, then without doing anything, out of nowhere I got 2 errors in appDelegate.h. One says this:

Expected

Answer 1

In my case, variable name was reserved to C++ because i change my files to *.mm

Answer 2

This message can also happen after pasting some code from Internet. There may be some invisible characters in your snippet.

• What you see in XCode with invisible chars OFF
  
• What's hidden (viewed in another text editor)
  
• What XCode 7.3 shows with invisible chars turned ON*
  
  You can configure XCode 7.3 to show the invisible characters by going in "Preferences...>Key bindings". Find "invisible" and choose a key combination (Command+shift+F1 for instance).

So ONE of the solutions (see others above...) if you have the "Expected Method Body" error is to re-type the erroneous line from scratch.

Answer 3

I had the same problem. At last I found that in my main.m I had accidentally added a "-" character in the beginning of the file.

Removing the character solved the problem.

Answer 4

In my case I copied over my new methods in my implementation file over to the header file. I also copied over the @implementation Class(category) line and forgot to change it to @interface.

Answer 5

Basically the

Expected method body

is because there is a type/extra character somewhere!

For me it was because the name of Apple's pre-defined's method was mis-spelled.

Answer 6

Try closing Xcode and then reopening and doing a clean build.

If that doesn't fix it, it's possible you've got a circular reference in one of your header files.

This can happen when foo.h #imports "bar.h" and bar.h #imports "foo.h" (or sometimes its a chain of three or more header files importing each other in a circle) and it leads to spurious errors like the one you're seeing.

The solution is to try to avoid importing headers in your .h files, and instead use @class references for external classes in the .h files and put the #imports in the .m files instead.