Creating an mailto: URL with a URL in the body iPhone SDK

Question

UPDATE: I just found a similar post here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/730101/how-do-i-encode-in-a-url-in-an-html-attribute-value

Please consider the code below: I try to send an email message from within my iPhone app. The problem I encounter is that I want to put a URL in the body of the email. This URL contains two ampersands. I am encoding all the strings using "stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding", but the URL ends up in my new mail messagd truncated after the first ampersand. IE: "http://www.mydomain.nl/?cm=79&ctime=1246572000&cid=4772" becomes "http://www.mydomain.nl/?cm=79".

Any suggestion what I could do to escape?

 NSString *eMailSubject = @"My Subject";
 NSString *encodedSubject = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:[eMailSubject stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]]; 
 NSString *eMailBody = @"http://www.mydomain.nl?cm=79&ctime=1246572000&cid=4772";
 NSString *encodedBody = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:[eMailBody stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]]; 
 NSString *urlString = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"mailto:?subject=%@&body=%@", encodedSubject, encodedBody]];
 NSString *encodedURL = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:[urlString stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]]; 
 NSURL *url = [[NSURL alloc] initWithString:encodedURL];
 [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:url];

Answer 1

Is the body of the email message HTML? If so, most email readers and browsers will try to interpret the ampersand as an HTML entity prefix and seeing 'ctime' instead of a legal entity value following the ampersand, just give up on parsing the rest of the string.

Here are some details. Try doing a string substitution of the '&' characters with '&' and see if that helps.

Also, might want to consider using the new messaging framework in OS 3.0 that allows you to send email directly from inside your app.

Answer 2

If you want real HTML URLs you can't use the mailto:.

You have to do one of the following:

1. implement your own SMTP server
2. use SDK 3.0 mail framework (MFMailCompose...)