Printing an NSString

Spewing stuff to stdout is actually a pretty rare thing to do in Cocoa, given that almost all projects are GUI in nature. There are relatively few projects that are built as command line tools or otherwise need to deal with stdout.

However, the Foundation does provide the means to write to stdout. Specifically, NSFileHandle has fileHandleWithStandardOutput which gives you a file handle that can write to stdout.

From there, it is a matter of converting the NSString to an NSData and writing it.

Quite a few steps, but easily wrapped up in a reusable function:

void MyLog(NSString *format, ...) {
    va_list args;
    va_start(args, format);
    NSString *formattedString = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat: format
                                                  arguments: args];
    va_end(args);
    [[NSFileHandle fileHandleWithStandardOutput]
        writeData: [formattedString dataUsingEncoding: NSNEXTSTEPStringEncoding]];
    [formattedString release];
}