URLWithString: returns nil

Question

Hi, it may be very easy, but I don't seems to find out why is URLWithString: returning nil here.

//localisationName is a arbitrary string here
NSString* webName = [localisationName stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; 
NSString* stringURL = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=%@,Montréal,Communauté-Urbaine-de-Montréal,Québec,Canadae&output=csv&oe=utf8&sensor=false&key=", webName];
NSURL* url = [NSURL URLWithString:stringURL];

I'm not new to Objective-C but I don't seems to find out why...

Answer 1

I guess you need to use -[NSString stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:]. See Apple doc.

Another comment is that, as an old timer, I find it a bit uneasy to put non-ASCII characters in a source file. That said, this Apple doc says, starting from 10.4, UTF-16 strings are OK inside @"...". Somehow GCC seems to correctly convert the source file in Latin-1 into UTF-16 in the binary, but I think it's safest to use 7-bit ASCII characters only inside the source code, and use NSLocalizedString.

Answer 2

I think your accented characters are throwing things off; they won't be handled by -stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:.

Answer 3

You need to escape the non-ASCII characters in your hardcoded URL as well:

//localisationName is a arbitrary string here
NSString* webName = [localisationName stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; 
NSString* stringURL = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=%@,Montréal,Communauté-Urbaine-de-Montréal,Québec,Canadae&output=csv&oe=utf8&sensor=false", webName];
NSString* webStringURL = [stringURL stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSURL* url = [NSURL URLWithString:webStringURL];

You can probably remove the escaping of the localisationName since it will be handled by the escaping of the whole string.

Answer 4

The URLWithString: call will return a nil if the string passed to it is malformed. Since NSURL returns nil for malformed urls, NSLog your string and set breakpoints to see exactly what is being passed to your NSURL creation method. If your URLWithString works with a hard coded value, that's further proof that whatever you are passing is malformed.see