Recipe: Searching Through a Table

Search display controllers allow users to filter a table’s contents in real time, providing instant responsiveness to a user-driven query. It’s a great feature that lets users interactively find what they’re looking for, with the results updating as each new character is entered into the query field.

Searches are best built around predicates, allowing you to filter arrays to retrieve matching items with a simple method call. Here is how you might search through a flat array of strings to retrieve items that match the text from a search bar. The [cd] after contains refers to case- and diacritic-insensitive matching. Diacritics are small marks that accompany a letter, such as the dots of an umlaut (¨) or the tilde (~) above a Spanish n.