 <p><strong>Update</strong></p> <p>This works but @rdelmar's answer is much more compact.</p> <p>/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////</p> <p>I discovered an <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9258606/iphone-find-one-string-in-another-with-case-insensetive">answer</a> elsewhere on SO. Basically I had to use NSRange and check via the following method:</p> <pre><code>[string rangeOfString:@"hello" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch].location != NSNotFound </code></pre> <p>I also had to split my string before doing the check. So in the example words are separated by a period. I called:</p> <pre><code>NSArray *myArray = [string componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet characterSetWithCharactersInString:@"."]]; </code></pre> <p>and the looped through that array of strings doing the <code>rangeOfString</code> search. I set a BOOL so that once my string 'hello' was found it stopped searching.</p>