What's the best way to find the user's Documents directory on an iPhone?

I'm reading Erica Sadun's iPhone Developer's Cookbook, and ran into a question.

She says in the book that the way to find the user's Documents directory is with the code:

[NSHomeDirectory() stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"Documents"];

but that seems slightly brittle, and dissimiliar to the normal Mac way of doing it, which would be:

NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentsDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);

Are there any particular reasons to use one over the other?

Solution 1:

Objc:

NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES)

Swift:

var paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSSearchPathDirectory.DocumentDirectory, NSSearchPathDomainMask.UserDomainMask, true)

You'll want the first element of the returned array.

Solution 2:

Here is the code that I use in my framework.

NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);
NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0];

Solution 3:

You should consider using the FileManager methods which return URLs, which are the preferred format.

let documentsURL = FileManager.default.urls(for: .documentDirectory, in: .userDomainMask).first

This method is intended to locate known and common directories in the system.

An array of URL objects identifying the requested directories. The directories are ordered according to the order of the domain mask constants, with items in the user domain first and items in the system domain last.