The author is maybe not aware that there's already a convenience form that doesn't require explicitly making an NSRegularExpression object. if name.rangeOf

The author is maybe not aware that there's already a convenience form that doesn't require explicitly making an NSRegularExpression object. if name.rangeOfString("ski$", options: .RegularExpressionSearch).location != NSNotFound { println("\(name) is probably polish") } That's existing Cocoa API; in Swift (hopefully!) the API can be updated to return nil if there's no match, so that it can read if let match = name.rangeOfString("ski$", options: .RegularExpressionSearch) { println("\(name) is probably polish") } which I don't think is too bad!