iOS Develoment: Why is my NSURLConnection failing with a "bad URL" error for only some users?

Question

I have an iOS app that requests JSON data from my Rails 3 app, hosted on Heroku, and it works great on my device and for many other users, except one. I have one user who has told me that my app fails to retrieve the JSON data, so I had her send me some log data and the log showed the NSURLConnection delegate method didFailWithError is being called and the error description reads "bad URL". Why is this error occurring and why is it ONLY occurring on just some devices instead of all devices?

Here's my code,

-(void)getTournamentInfoWithUsername:(NSString*)username
{
    NSString *urlString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"http://myapp-tourney.heroku.com/tournaments/next.json?username=%@", username];
    NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:urlString];
    NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url cachePolicy:NSURLRequestReturnCacheDataElseLoad timeoutInterval:30];
    [self setUrlConnection:[[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:request delegate:self]];
}

- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection*)connection didFailWithError:(NSError*)error
{
    [MyLog logError:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@ - %@ - %@ - %@", [error localizedDescription], [error localizedFailureReason], [error localizedRecoveryOptions], [error localizedRecoverySuggestion]]];
}

and the log shows...

bad URL - (null) - (null) - (null)

Thanks so much for all your wisdom!

Are the usernames of those who experience crashes/failures looking any suspicious? — Till, May 28 '11 at 15:45
look at my answer for the more detailed answer : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6287230/bad-url-when-requesting-with-nsurl/10292920#10292920 — YogiAR, Oct 30 '13 at 10:45

score 30 · Accepted Answer · answered May 28 '11 at 15:45

30

It doesn't look like you are encoding the username. Are there spaces or other special characters in the username? Look into using the NSString method stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:.

answered May 28 '11 at 15:45

Jim

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Yep, that is what I would suspect as well. – Till May 28 '11 at 15:46
Yes, her username does have a space in it, thank you! Can I ask which encoding I should use? Would 'NSUTF8StringEncoding' work? How do I know which to choose? Thanks again! – BeachRunnerFred May 28 '11 at 15:59
Yes, use UTF-8, as that is what is required by [RFC 3986](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986). – Jim May 28 '11 at 16:06
3

My god Apple has some awful method names. – devios1 Jul 30 '13 at 01:16

score 8 · Answer 2 · answered May 28 '11 at 15:47

8

It is likely that this depends on the specific URL containing characters that are not allowed for a URL.

You can try and escape the URL:

- (NSString *)stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:(NSStringEncoding)encoding`

answered May 28 '11 at 15:47

sergio

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 22 '13 at 07:37

I'm not sure how if at all it relates to your issue, but changing the Region in the Settings App had an affect on my app's ability to download. It was spitting out the same Bad URL error if the region was not set to United States. It might explain why some users are getting errors and not others.

Srithar Rajendran · Answer 4 · 2013-09-02T12:25:17.920

-1

This kind of issue may will come due to argument data having special characters(ie. Andy & Co). SOAP automatically will reject this request and returns Bad URL or Bad Request. So, before you sending the data please ensure the data having special characters like &,<,>... If you found & in your string data , replace with <&>amp; to that string(eg.Andy <&>amp; Co). Hope this input will help for you.

Note: Before you use,Please remove start(<>) and end tag with that symbol.

edited Sep 02 '13 at 12:25

answered Sep 02 '13 at 12:19

Srithar Rajendran

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Actully Jim already gave the same answer, I don't think you are providing any new information. – ılǝ Sep 02 '13 at 12:41

iOS Develoment: Why is my NSURLConnection failing with a "bad URL" error for only some users?

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