NSStringFromClass in Swift is Here!

Posted on January 14th, 2016

One of the first things I immediately noticed was missing from Swift was the NSStringFromClass replacement. I like to use the class name for my TableViewCell identifiers, and then just NSStringFromClass to dequeue the cells to avoid spelling issues.

In Swift, I would write an ugly extension to do that as seen in this StackOverflow answer:

public extension NSObject{
    public class var nameOfClass: String{
        return NSStringFromClass(self).componentsSeparatedByString(".").last!
    }

    public var nameOfClass: String{
        return NSStringFromClass(self.dynamicType).componentsSeparatedByString(".").last!
    }
}

public extension NSObject{

public class var nameOfClass: String{

return NSStringFromClass(self).componentsSeparatedByString(".").last!

}

public var nameOfClass: String{

return NSStringFromClass(self.dynamicType).componentsSeparatedByString(".").last!

}

Not sure when it happened, but I was extremely to see a more native solution in @aligatr’s blog post!

// This now works!!!
String(MyTableViewCell)

1 2	// This now works!!! String(MyTableViewCell)

I tried it out myself just to be sure and it actually works!!

Custom BlueTableViewCell

// BlueTableViewController
    override func tableView(tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
        
        // the cell gets dequeued properly!!!
        let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier(String(BlueTableViewCell), forIndexPath: indexPath)

        return cell
    }

// BlueTableViewController

override func tableView(tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {

// the cell gets dequeued properly!!!

let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier(String(BlueTableViewCell), forIndexPath: indexPath)

return cell

}

Super excited I don’t have to use the extension anymore!