What does @“some string” mean in objective-c?

Question

I\'m just starting out with iphone development and ran across some example code that used @\"somestring\"

someLabel.txt = @\"string of text\";

Answer 1

Just an interesting side note... NSString literals created by using the @"..." notation are not autoreleased. They essentially just hang around until your program terminates.

Just a caution that if you want to maintain control over whether or not this object gets released (freed) down the road you may want to consider using something like:

[NSString stringWithString:@"..."]; 

...instead. This would create an autoreleased version of the same string that will be freed from memory next time the "autorelease pool is drained".

Just food for thought.

Cheers-

Answer 2

In Objective-C, the syntax @"foo" is an immutable, literal instance of NSString.

Answer 3

It creates an NSString object with that string as opposed to the standard c char* that would be created without the '@'