Suppose if i want to erase a value stored in a NSString variable, i will assign a nil to it. This is possible. But if i want to erase a date variable that already holds some values, what should i do?
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Jacob Relkin
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nil is just an object placeholder. You can assign any Objective-C object pointer to it.
So yeah, you can assign a variable of type NSDate * to nil.
If you have ownership of the object however, you should send it the -release message before setting the variable to nil or else the memory pointed to by the variable will be leaked.
Jacob Relkin
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Thank you... One more doubt. In string, we can assign an empty character to a string variable. Like NSString *s = @""; For a NSDate variable how can we assign an empty value? – Jan 27 '11 at 06:04
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@Rajkanth `[NSDate date]` would suffice. – Jacob Relkin Jan 27 '11 at 06:05
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@Rajkanth But why would you want to do this? – Jacob Relkin Jan 27 '11 at 06:06
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I have a view to select Date of Birth. Suppose one may want to delete the saved birth date. So only i asked – Jan 27 '11 at 06:29
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you can... but it is advisable to release it if it is not autorelease object..
i.e
[dateObject release]; // Only if it is not autorelease object.
dateObject = nil;
Mihir Mehta
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If we release a variable, it will remove from the memory. Then how can we assign a nil to it? – Jan 27 '11 at 06:06
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@Rajkanth Just because the memory is deallocated doesn't mean that the pointer reference doesn't still exist. – Jacob Relkin Jan 27 '11 at 06:06