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

Resile

Answer 1

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.)

Titleholder

ok this could be an approach but I'm not sure the url will always look like that. Could also be: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevölkerungsentwicklung – Resile

@Joerg: Sorry; I assumed the search term was user-input. :S – Titleholder

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. – Mantinea

That method didn't exist when this question was answered, but that's now correct. – Titleholder

Answer 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];

Attain

hm yes but I'm looking more for a solution to encode any url. it also could be: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevölkerungsentwicklung – Resile

Answer 3

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);
}

Thegn