NSMutableUrlRequest eats plus signs

Question

I create NSMutableUrlRequest for sending data to server, add all necessary fields to it and then add the string for sending like this:

[theRequest setHTTPBody:[postString dataUsingEncoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding]];

postString is a usual NSString.

The problem is, when I receive this request at the server, all the plus (+) signs disappear from the http body. So if I had "abcde+fghj" on iPhone, I get "abcde fghj" on the server".

Can this be some encoding problem from using dataUsingEncoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding? Or some NSMutableUrlRequest stripping feature? What can I do to make it stop stripping plus signs? I need to receive UTF8 strings at the server side.

Answer 1

The plus (+) sign is a standard shortcut for a space, in a URL's query string portion. If you want a literal +, encode it as %2b.

Answer 2

Hi,

May be the server doesn't know which is the encoding of the POST body. Have you tried to add the charset=UTF-8 into the header of your request like that:

[theRequest setValue:@"application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Type"];