How to get the lines in a string as an array

Swift version: 5.1

Paul Hudson    @twostraws    May 28th 2019

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

Similar solutions…

• How to add drag and drop to your app
• Optional vs implicitly unwrapped optional: what’s the difference?
• How to convert dates and times to a string using DateFormatter
• How do you create multi-dimensional arrays?
• How to handle unknown properties and methods using @dynamicMemberLookup

About the Swift Knowledge Base

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