objective c - What is the difference between NSString* mystring and NSString *mystring

Question

I've come across several examples which declares classes in the header differently like

NSString* mystring;

or

NSString *mystring;

What's the difference?

Answer 1

Those are three totally distinct lexical elements and the amount of whitespace in-between them is totally irrelevant. These are all equivalent in terms of what the compiler generates:

NSString*x;
NSString *x;
NSString* x;
NSString * x;
NSString                 *                 x;
NSString /* comment here */ * /* and another */ x;

I prefer the NSString *x variation since the pointer specifier belongs to the variable, not the type. By that, I mean that both of these:

int *x, y;
int* x, y;

create an integer pointer called x and an integer called y, not two integer pointers.