NSURL with special characters

Question

How can I encode this url to be displayed in a UIWebview:

http://de.wikipedia.org/?search=Bevölkerungsentwicklung

I tried:

-stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUnicodeStringEncoding
-stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding

and

CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(kCFAllocatorDefault,
                                        (CFStringRef)mobileUrl,
                                        NULL,
                                        (CFStringRef)@"!*'();:@&=+$,/?%#[]",
                                        kCFStringEncodingUTF8);

thanks

joerg

score 8 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 10 '10 at 15:38

8

Encode just the search part of the URL string:

// searchString is the unescaped search string, e.g., "Bevölkerungsentwicklung"

NSString *encodedSearchString = [searchString stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSString *urlString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"http://de.wikipedia.org/?search=%@", encodedSearchString];
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:urlString];

(Note as well that NSUTF8StringEncoding is the encoding used.)

answered Nov 10 '10 at 15:38

Wevah

28,182
7
83
72

1

ok this could be an approach but I'm not sure the url will always look like that. Could also be: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevölkerungsentwicklung – Joerg Nov 11 '10 at 14:55
@Joerg: Sorry; I assumed the search term was user-input. :S – Wevah Nov 11 '10 at 15:55
`stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding` is deprecated: Use `stringByAddingPercentEncodingWithAllowedCharacters(_:)` instead, which always uses the recommended UTF-8 encoding, and which encodes for a specific URL component or subcomponent since each URL component or subcomponent has different rules for what characters are valid. – Ryan R Dec 06 '15 at 08:22
That method didn't exist when this question was answered, but that's now correct. – Wevah Dec 06 '15 at 08:46

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 10 '10 at 16:23

2

Just use below sample code;


NSString *urlstring = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"http://de.wikipedia.org/?search=%@", searchString];
NSString *encodedString = [urlstring stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:encodedString];

answered Nov 10 '10 at 16:23

jfalexvijay

3,681
7
42
68

1

hm yes but I'm looking more for a solution to encode any url. it also could be: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevölkerungsentwicklung – Joerg Nov 11 '10 at 14:57

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 14 '13 at 19:15

I found also that for some North European characters, NSISOLatin1StringEncoding fits better. This one gives me a better result

- (void) testEncoding {
    NSString * urlString = @"http://example/path/fileName_blå.pdf";
    urlString = [urlString stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSISOLatin1StringEncoding];
    NSURL * url = [NSURL URLWithString:urlString];
    NSLog(@"URL: %@", url);
}

NSURL with special characters

3 Answers3

Linked