'How to check if a tableview contains certain text?

I have an app that allows users to save different quotes. The data gets saved in a user account using Firebase. If a user wants to see what quotes they saved, they can do so in the app as well. They simply click a button, which goes to a separate view controller and displays all saved quotes in a table view. The issue I'm having is that the same quote can be saved multiple times. So, I would like to be able to have the app check the content of the tableview and, if a quote is already saved in the table, change the save button to a saved button. Any thoughts on how to go about this?

This is what I use to save to Firebase:

import UIKit
import FirebaseDatabase
import FirebaseAuth

class QuotesViewController: UIViewController {

var ref: DatabaseReference?


override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()
    configureItems()
    ref = Database.database().reference()
    
@IBAction func saveButton(_ sender: UIButton) {
  guard let user = Auth.auth().currentUser?.uid else { return }
    ref!.child("users").child(Auth.auth().currentUser!.uid).child("Quotes").childByAutoId().setValue(quotesLabel.text!)

}
}

To retrieve data:

import UIKit
import FirebaseDatabase
import FirebaseAuth

class SavedQuotesViewController: UIViewController, UITableViewDelegate, UITableViewDataSource {

var ref: DatabaseReference?
var databaseHandle: DatabaseHandle?
var postData = [String]()


@IBOutlet weak var tableView: UITableView!

@IBOutlet weak var textLabel: UILabel!

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()

    tableView.delegate = self
    tableView.dataSource = self
    
    ref = Database.database().reference()
    
    
    
    databaseHandle = ref?.child("users").child(Auth.auth().currentUser!.uid).child("Quotes").observe(.childAdded, with: { (snapshot) in
        let post = snapshot.value as? String
        
        if let actualPost = post {
        self.postData.append(actualPost)
            self.tableView.reloadData()
        }
})
        
}

    func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, numberOfRowsInSection section: Int) -> Int{
        return postData.count
    }
    
    func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
        
        let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCell(withIdentifier: "PostCell")
        cell?.textLabel?.text = postData[indexPath.row]
        cell?.textLabel?.numberOfLines = 0

        
        return cell!
        
    }

}

Solution 1:^[1]

As jnpdx said in their comment, you are thinking about this wrong. The table view is a View object. It doesn't store data, it presents it to the user and provides an interface for the user to interact with that data.

You want a model of some kind to store your data. Your Firebase database might be that model, or you might load your records into a model object in memory. I assume you've already made those decisions. (I haven't used Firebase, so I don't know if it's fast enough to serve up data for a table view or not. I suspect not. In order to support smooth scrolling, you want to be able to serve up cells as fast as possible.)

You need a way to tell if your quote is unique. As Claude suggested in his comment, you might want to set up your quote string in Firebase to be hashed/indexed. If you do that testing for uniqueness will be really fast. When the user enters a new quote, you could query the database with the quote string (or it's hash) and see if a record already exists with that hash. If it does, you could update the UI to tell the user that the quote already exists.

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution	Source
Solution 1	Duncan C

'How to check if a tableview contains certain text?

Solution 1:[1]

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Solution 1:^[1]