String won't url encode in iOS

Question

I'm seriously having a brain fart here, but I can't figure out why this isn't encoding for the life of me. Been searching all over, and I can't even get the code samples to encode. Any ideas?

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

JoeCortopassi · Accepted Answer · 2015-05-16 01:39:26Z

25

For future reference, this is what I found to work (i.e. encode everything properly)

+ (NSString*)encodeURL:(NSString *)string { NSString *newString = (__bridge_transfer NSString *)CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(kCFAllocatorDefault, (__bridge CFStringRef)string, NULL, CFSTR(":/?#[]@!$ &'()*+,;=\"<>%{}|\\^~`"), CFStringConvertNSStringEncodingToEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding)); if (newString) { return newString; } return @""; }

edited May 16, 2015 at 1:39

answered Feb 10, 2012 at 17:48

JoeCortopassi

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4 Comments

Carlos Ricardo Over a year ago

Anyone understand why? This works very well, but why stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding: does not sometimes?

Nate Petersen Over a year ago

The bridging cast you are using in this answer is incorrect, and will cause a memory leak. You should be using '__bridge_transfer' for the result. See this question for more info: stackoverflow.com/questions/6822473/correct-bridging-for-arc

sv_lane Over a year ago

@CarlosRicardo stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding: is intended to only escape characters that are not legal URL characters. "&" is a legal URL character, therefore it is not escaped. If you want to include "&" in a query parameter, however, you need to use this code instead to make sure it gets escaped.

ReDetection Over a year ago

This is deprecated since iOS 9.0. Apple offers to use stringByAddingPercentEncodingWithAllowedCharacters: instead (which is available since iOS 7.0)

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