How to get the lines in a string as an array

Paul Hudson    February 13th 2018    @twostraws

Swift’s strings have their lines separated by the \n character, which is a line break on Unix operating systems. Using that plus the components(separatedBy:) method, you can get an array of all the lines in a string like this:

let lines = str.components(separatedBy: "\n")

If you intend to use that regularly, consider making an extension on String like this one:

extension String {
    var lines: [String] {
        return self.components(separatedBy: "\n")
    }
}

Available from iOS 8.0

Did this solution work for you? Please pass it on!

Tweet

Other people are reading…

• How to measure a string for Objective-C code
• How to parse a sentence using NSLinguisticTagger
• How to capitalize the first letter of a string
• How to trim whitespace in a string
• How to specify floating-point precision in a string

About the Swift Knowledge Base

This is part of the Swift Knowledge Base, a free, searchable collection of solutions for common iOS questions.