Shared action for many UIButtons, get button-specific string

I have a view containing a number of UIButtons "Tom and Jerry", "The Lion King", etc. I want all of them to invoke the same action in my view controller, and then differentiate between the different buttons to get a button-specific NSString (e.g. identifiers like "TomJerry", "LionKing").

Ideas:

1. Abuse buttons' title text property (custom button style, clear text color).
   • Would work, but feels dirty… (and only works if the button doesn't need to display text.)
2. Subclass UIButton with an extra ivar + property "context".
   • Great for adding the buttons programmatically,
   • but: my view is loaded from a Nib, so I would have to define an outlet for every button (and set its context property in awakeFromNib or viewDidLoad). Bleh…
3. Create a subclass for each button with different "-(NSString*)context" method implementations.
   • Ugh… seriously? ;-)
4. Use tags to identify buttons and a dictionary for mapping tags to button-specific strings.
   • DRY violation: The tag would need to be known/specified twice – in the Nib to identify the button, and in the dictionary to retrieve the corresponding string.
   • I have thus far avoided using tags. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to start?

How best to achieve this? Any ideas, best-practices, implementation patterns?

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Update: After reading the first answers (thanks!), I believe I should add some points for clarification.

All of the above approaches should work; point is, I don't particularly like any of them. I am asking you which of the approaches you would favor (and why), or whether there are other better approaches.

Further "requirements":

• I don't want to connect each button as an outlet.
• I want to retrieve the button-specific string in a generic fashion, i.e. no switch on the action sender à la if (sender==self.button1) {…} else if (sender==self.button2) {…}

Added
An option would be to create a category of UIButton adding a method that returns an NSString based on the tag. You've still got the potential tag trouble but the tag-to-string conversion -- actual and conceptual -- is all in one place.

I believe this meets your original and further requirements.

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Previously
Tags are fast and light, comparing two integers.

You can easily create a numbering scheme that keeps things cleanly separated: 1000-1999 is this type of thing, 1000-1099 is this subgroup, 1015 is an instance, etc.

Numeric comparisons are available: x.tag > 10000 do this.

Obviously, though, that means you have to track it and your code could end up difficult to parse down the road. Still, some nifty advantages.