day-029

Day 29: Project 5: WordScramble (Part One)

Follow along at https://www.hackingwithswift.com/100/swiftui/29.

📒 Field Notes

This day covers Part One of Project 5: WordScramble in the 100 Days of SwiftUI Challenge.

It focuses on several specific topics:

• Word Scramble: Introduction
• Introducing List, your best friend
• Loading resources from your app bundle
• Working with strings

Word Scramble: Introduction

From the description:

The game will show players a random eight-letter word, and ask them to make words out of it.

For example, if the starter word is “alarming” they might spell “alarm”, “ring”, “main”, and so on.

These "words from another word" are also known as anagrams.

Introducing List, your best friend

Lists are essentially SwiftUI's version of UIKit's TableView. But one neat difference is their ability to seamlessly integrate static and dynamic content within the same List element:

List {
    Section(header: Text("Section 1")) {
        Text("Static row 1")
        Text("Static row 2")
    }

    Section(header: Text("Section 2")) {
        ForEach(0..<5) {
            Text("Dynamic row \($0)")
        }
    }

    Section(header: Text("Section 3")) {
        Text("Static row 3")
        Text("Static row 4")
    }
}

Oh... and, that tight integration with the Section element is pretty sweet, too 🙂.

Loading resources from your app bundle

Whenever we have something in our app's Bundle that we want to deal with in code, we first need to locate it with a URL (which is why it's called a "Uniform Resource Locator").

In many cases, we'd use this URL to create an instance of Data, and then decode that data into some kind of structured model based upon the structure of the file.

In this app, though, we'll be grabbing the contents of a plain-text file that lacks the structure of something like JSON.

Fortunately, because Swift Strings are weapons-grade, we can also create them directly from the content's of a file:

if let fileContents = try? String(contentsOf: fileURL) {
    // we loaded the file into a string!
}