I'd like to return a Cartesian coordinate (x, y), as two ints. The only way I see is to create a class and return an instance of it.
How to return two values from a method in Objective C?
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4 Answers
You can only return one value from a function (just like C), but the value can be anything, including a struct. And since you can return a struct by value, you can define a function like this (to borrow your example):
-(NSPoint)scalePoint:(NSPoint)pt by:(float)scale { return NSMakePoint(pt.x*scale, pt.y*scale); } This is only really appropriate for small/simple structs.
If you want to return more than one new object, your function should take pointers to the object pointer, thus:
-(void)mungeFirst:(NSString**)stringOne andSecond:(NSString**)stringTwo { *stringOne = [NSString stringWithString:@"foo"]; *stringTwo = [NSString stringWithString:@"baz"]; } 
1 Comment
gavinb
And now with the introduction of Swift, you can return multiple arguments from functions using tuples. See The Swift Programming Language for details.
Couldn't you make an NSArray for this?
return [NSArray arrayWithObjects:coorX, coorY, nil]; 
1 Comment
Georg Schölly
Using a dictionary / array as the return type is in most cases bad style.
You can either return one value directly and return another by reference, as shown in gs's answer, or create a struct type and return that. For example, Cocoa already includes a type to identify points on a 2D plane, NSPoint.
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I recommend you to return an NSDictionary, inside Dictionary you can store and send any object type and any number of variables.
-(NSDictionary*)calculateWith:(id)arg { NSDictionary *urDictionary =@{@"key1":value1,@"Key2":value2,.....}; return urDictionary; } 