NSPredicate crash with path which contains square brackets

Question

I have to search paths which contains square brackets in it from core data. But when I trying to create search query like below, xcode crashes.

path == /my/local/[path]

I've tried to escape square brackets, from one brackets to 16 brackets, but nothing works.

That path is from another application, so It couldn't be changed. what should I have to do? Thank you for your help in advance!

EDIT:
My code for making NSPredicate is like this.
NSPredicate *preTest = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"localFilePath == /[test]/"];

UPDATE:
I found something weird.
NSPredicate *testPre = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"localFilePath == %@", uploadFile.remotePath];
NSPredicate *what = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"localFilePath == /"];
Where uploadFile.remotePath equals @"/".
First one is ok, but second one crashes!

I think it seems to be related with my issue. Any ideas?
Thanks for allow your times on my issue! :)

Answer 1

If you need to match [ and ] you can use matches operator, which uses regular expressions. Example:

NSArray *array = @[@"[apple]", @"[boy]", @"[dog]", @"cat"];
NSPredicate *pred = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"self matches %@", @"\\[dog\\]"];
NSLog(@"%@", [array filteredArrayUsingPredicate:pred]);

---

About your update: predicateWithFormat is not like stringWithFormat, as it does some additional jobs that help to construct the predicate. For instance

[NSPredicate predicateWithFormat@"localFilePath == %@", @"/"]

is equivalent to

[NSPredicate predicateWithFormat@"localFilePath == \"/\""]

You can see that the quotation marks are added automatically. Also predicateWithFormat accepts some special substitutions like %K (for dynamic properties).

Apple provides a nice tutorial about using predicates you may want to check out.