What is the significance of pragma marks Why do we need pragma marks

Question

What is the purpose of  pragma marks in Xcode  Does their location in  m files matter  Should some  pragma come before all others    Do they have to be present   Can new marks be added  Why would they be  What causes it  Is there any harm in having a mark removed  Would one ever want to

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pragma mark - NSSecureCoding   The main purpose of  pragma  is for developer reference   You can easily find a method Function in a vast thousands of coding lines   Xcode 11    Marker Line in Top     MARK  - Properties   Marker Line in Top and Bottom     MARK  - Properties -    Marker Line only in bottom     MARK  Properties -

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When we have a big lengthy class say more than couple 100 lines of code we can t see everything on Monitor screen  hence we can t see overview  also called document items  of our class  Sometime we want to see overview of our class  its all methods  constants  properties etc at a glance  You can press Ctrl 6 in XCode to see overview of your class  You ll get a pop-up kind of Window aka Jump Bar   By default  this jump bar doesn t have any buckets sections  It s just one long list   Though we can just start typing when jump Bar appears and it will search among jump bar items   Here comes the need of pragma mark   If you want to create sections in your Jump Bar then you can use pragma marks with relevant description  Now refer snapshot attached in question  There  View lifeCycle  and  A section dedicated     are sections created by pragma marks

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pragma mark directives show up in Xcode in the menus for direct access to methods  They have no impact on the program at all   For example  using it with Xcode 4 will make those items appear directly in the Jump Bar   There is a special pragma mark - which creates a line

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pragma mark is used to tag the group of methods so you may easily find and detect methods from the Jump Bar  It may help you when your code files reach about 1000 lines and you want to find methods quickly through the category from Jump box   In a long program it becomes difficult to remember and find a method name  So pragma mark allows you to categorize methods according to the work they do  For example  you tagged some tag for Table View Protocol Methods  AlertView Methods  Init Methods  Declaration etc     pragma mark is the facility for XCode but it has no impact on your code  It merely helps to make it easier to find methods while coding

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Just to add the information I was looking for  pragma mark is Xcode specific  so if you deal with a C   project that you open in different IDEs  it does not have any effect there  In Qt Creator  for example  it does not add categories for methods  nor generate any warnings errors   EDIT   pragma is a preprocessor directive which comes from C programming language  Its purpose is to specify implementation-dependent information to the compiler - that is  each compiler might choose to interpret this directive as it wants  That said  it is rather considered an extension which does not change influence the code itself  So compilers might as well ignore it    Xcode is an IDE which takes advantage of  pragma and uses it in its own specific way  The point is   pragma is not Xcode and even Objective-C specific

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While searching for doc to point to about how pragma are directives for the compiler  I found this NSHipster article that does the job pretty well   I hope you ll enjoy the reading

User · Answer

In simple word we can say that   pragma mark - is used for categorizing methods  so you can find your methods easily  It is very useful for long projects

[objective-c] What is the significance of #pragma marks? Why do we need #pragma marks?

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