I am making player which going to support Google DFP adserver. The Ad-server has a VAST link which is XML type and contains media-file, track links, clickLink etc...
The clickLinks includes a redirecting url to the original url which I could not properly decode.
I tried to decode by using stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding and then encode again but NSURL seems to be broken.
Original VastURL is:
How can properly cast this to an NSURL?
Read your question again, carefully. You say you want to decode the URL and call a method that's called
stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding ^^^^^^ Try using stringByRemovingPercentEncoding. This should decode your URL.
To the other question, how to "cast" it to NSURL: Casting means you are forcing the debugger to treat a variable like a specific type. Meaning you cannot cast an object and turn it into an instance of another type.
You have to create an instance of NSURL using a string:
NSURL *URL = [NSURL URLWithString:[URLString stringByRemovingPercentEncoding]];
URLWithString converts a string into URL. Thats it. Don't think of "lets do as much as can for the computer, he is too stupid anyway". Remember; you are developing for an Apple platform. Use it as you would do in real life. Don't think of abstractions like encoding. Apple will do it all for you!You can use componentsSeparatedByString.
Example:
NSString* url = @"https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ads?sz=624x352&iu=/131302407/Uzman_Dky&impl=s&gdfp_req=1&env=vp&output=xml_vast2&unviewed_position_start=1&url=[referrer_url]&description_url=[description_url]&correlator=1443516172"; NSArray* components = [url componentsSeparatedByString:@"&"]; for (NSString* str in components) { NSArray* keyval = [str componentsSeparatedByString:@"="]; // keyval[0] is your key // keyval[1] is your value NSLog(@"key: %@ | value: %@", keyval[0], keyval[1]); } Example output:
key: https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ads?sz | value: 624x352 key: iu | value: /131302407/Uzman_Dky key: impl | value: s key: gdfp_req | value: 1 key: env | value: vp key: output | value: xml_vast2 key: unviewed_position_start | value: 1 key: url | value: [referrer_url] key: description_url | value: [description_url] key: correlator | value: 1443516172 The URLs you got, can be decoded by stringByRemovingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding, to remove all escape sequences.
The problem was, url relies on CDATA thats why it could not decode/encode properly. I used - (void) parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser foundCDATA:(NSData *)CDATABlock{ delegation method and encoded the string like this:
NSString *string = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:CDATABlock encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; Than I assigned to NSURL without any problem.