Foundation

Work with primitive values and other fundamental types used throughout Cocoa.

Create and process strings of Unicode characters, use regular expressions to find patterns, and perform natural language analysis of text.

Use arrays, dictionaries, sets, and specialized collections to store and iterate groups of objects or values.

Compare dates and times, and perform calendar and time zone calculations.

Label numeric quantities with physical dimensions to allow locale-aware formatting and conversion between related units.

Convert numbers, dates, measurements, and other values to and from locale-aware string representations.

Use predicates, expressions, and sort descriptors to examine elements in collections and other services.

Manage your app’s work and how it interacts with system services like Handoff and Shortcuts.

Access assets and other data bundled with your app.

Design patterns for broadcasting information and for subscribing to broadcasts.

Manage the interaction between an app extension and its hosting app.

Respond to problem situations in your interactions with APIs, and fine-tune your app for better debugging.

Allow users to control your app with AppleScript and other automation technologies, or run scripts from within your app.

Create, read, write, and examine files and folders in the file system.

Convert objects and values to and from property list, JSON, and other flat binary representations.

Persistently store domain-scoped pieces of information used to configure your app.

Search for files and other items on the local device, and index your app's content for searching.

Manage files and key-value data that are automatically synchronized among a user's iCloud devices.

Interact with URLs and communicate with servers using standard Internet protocols.

Advertise services for easy discovery on local networks, or discover services advertised by others.

Manage secure interprocess communication.

Get low-level support for basic Objective-C features, Cocoa design patterns, and Swift integration.

Manage your app's interaction with the host operating system and other processes, and implement low-level concurrency features.

Use low-level Unix features to manage input and output among files, processes, and the network.

This document describes the data types and constants found in the Foundation framework.