NSPredicate Character and/or Letter Substitutions - nsstring

Question

I've seen some, somewhat, similar questions about filtering out special characters in a predicate - but nothing suitable for my needs. I'm not really sure if what I want to do is even possible but I'll put it to the community instead:
I'm working with strings of pronunciations for a dictionary that contain a lot of IPA characters for instance:
ȵ
ɕ
ŋ
Ẓ
What I would like to do is set up some substitutions for these characters, something like:
n=ȵ
x=ɕ
ng=ŋ
r=Ẓ
in a search predicate so that a search for n* would result with anything beginning in ȵ, etc, etc...
Even other IPA 'letters' like "v" would be best resembled by a "w" if there is a simple way to switch in SEARCH letters for other STRING letters that would be great...

Answer 1

It seems like this should be done outside the predicate. Create a dictionary where the keys are the strings to be replaced and the values are the replacements. Then, have a loop which iterates over the dictionary and performs each replacement on the string that you will be searching. The resulting string after replacement is the string that you use in the predicate.

Answer 2

got the answer from here:
stackoverflow.com/questions/21852502/nspredicate-ignore-numbers-in-string-pinyin
an other question to which I asked...
this is the code [incase this is helpful for anyone else later] I used for string "pro" in class Words
- (NSString *)searchableStringValueTwo {
NSCharacterSet *invalidSet = [NSCharacterSet characterSetWithCharactersInString:#"ȵ"];
NSString *searchString = [[pro componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:invalidSet] componentsJoinedByString:#"n"];
return searchString;
}
- (NSString *)searchableStringValueThree {
NSCharacterSet *invalidSet = [NSCharacterSet characterSetWithCharactersInString:#"ɕ"];
NSString *searchString = [[pro componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:invalidSet] componentsJoinedByString:#"x"];
return searchString;
}
- (NSString *)searchableStringValueFour {
NSCharacterSet *invalidSet = [NSCharacterSet characterSetWithCharactersInString:#"ŋ"];
NSString *searchString = [[pro componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:invalidSet] componentsJoinedByString:#"ng"];
return searchString;
}
- (NSString *)searchableStringValueFive {
NSCharacterSet *invalidSet = [NSCharacterSet characterSetWithCharactersInString:#"Ẓ"];
NSString *searchString = [[pro componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:invalidSet] componentsJoinedByString:#"r"];
return searchString;
}
- (NSString *)searchableStringValueSix {
NSCharacterSet *invalidSet = [NSCharacterSet characterSetWithCharactersInString:#"v"];
NSString *searchString = [[pro componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:invalidSet] componentsJoinedByString:#"w"];
return searchString;
}