On Dec 12, 2012, at 6:36 AM, jonat...@mugginsoft.com wrote:
> On 12 Dec 2012, at 09:57, Andreas Grosam <agro...@onlinehome.de> wrote:
>> On 12.12.2012, at 10:19, Charles Srstka wrote:
>>> On Dec 12, 2012, at 3:03 AM, Andreas Grosam <agro...@onlinehome.de> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> How can I check at runtime whether an object (id) is actually a block, and 
>>>> not another kind of object?
>>> 
>>> I don't think there's any good way of doing that right now. You could check 
>>> the class of the block, but since the block classes are completely 
>>> undocumented AFAIK, there's no guarantee that the class names won't change 
>>> in some future release of OS X and break your code.
>> Thanks for the reply. I feared that. 
>> 
>> Currently, I resort to 
>> 
>> 
>> if ([obj isKindOfClass: NSClassFromString(@"NSBlock")])
>> …
>> 
>> which evaluates to YES if `obj` is a block. However, NSBlock is not a public 
>> class, thus: NSClassFromString(@"NSBlock") which "works" as the time of 
>> writing in Mac OS, and returns a class whose name is "NSBlock" (the real 
>> block classes are named differently).
>> 
>> I wish there was something official.
> You could perhaps make this a little less fragile.
> 
>    typedef void (^MyBlockType)(void);
> 
>    // we know this is a block
>    void (^isaBlock)(void) = ^(void) {};
> 
>    MyBlockType aBlock = ^(void) {NSLog(@"I am a block");};
> 
>    id qua = aBlock;
> 
>    if ([qua isKindOfClass:[isaBlock class]]) {
>       ((MyBlockType)qua)();
>    }

This will not work for all cases. For example, a stack-based block versus one 
that's been copied to the heap will have different classes, which are probably 
siblings (i.e. [[_NSConcreteStackBlock class] isKindOfClass:[_NSMallocBlock 
class]] == NO).

My solution to this issue has been the "exclusion" case, i.e. if (![obj 
isKindOfClass:[anything my API contract says I can receive that isn't a 
block]]) { /* it's a block by process of elimination */ }. Obviously this won't 
work if your API contract says you can receive arbitrary objects.

-- Gwynne Raskind


_______________________________________________

Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com)

Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list.
Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com

Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com

This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com

Reply via email to