NSURL Encoding in ObjC

Question

Hi ,

How to do URL encoding in NSURL ?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:

NSString* escapedUrlString =
   [unescapedString stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:
                        NSUTF8StringEncoding];

However, in my experience, this method isn't quite perfect (in handling some reserved characters), and in many cases I needed to use the variant:

 NSString * escapedUrlString =
  (NSString *)CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(
    NULL,
    (CFStringRef)unescapedString,
    NULL,
    (CFStringRef)@"!*'();:@&=+$,/?%#[]",
    kCFStringEncodingUTF8 );

Answer 2

stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding: has some problems with URL arguments.

In conjunction I use gtm_stringByEscapingForURLArgument from Google Toolbox for Mac for URL arguments.