iphone: Getting xml with UIWebView?

Question

Hi guys

I have the following url http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/recently_featured?&start-index=1&max-results=15&v=2

I am trying to load it in UIWebView and then use javascript to get its contents, and parse it with NSXMLParser.

My code looks like that:

-(void)startDownloading{
    NSString *urlStr = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/recently_featured?&start-index=%d&max-results=%d&v=2", range.location, range.length];
 NSLog(urlStr);
 NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:urlStr];

 NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
     [browser loadRequest:request];

    }

    - (void)webViewDidFinishLoad:(UIWebView *)webView{

     NSString *theStr = [webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"document.body.firstChild.innerHTML"];
     NSLog(theStr);
     NSData *receivedData = [theStr dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

    }

the problem is that the data that I receive can't be parsed with NSXMLParser. The text looks like that: <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xmlns:app='http://www.w3.org/2007/app' xmlns:media='http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/' xmlns:openSearch='http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/' xmlns:gd='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005' xmlns:yt='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007' gd:etag='W/&quot;DUADR347eCp7ImA9Wx5UFkg.&quot;'><id>tag:youtube.com,2008:standardfeed:us:recently_featured</id><updated>...

while if I had used just the regular approach of getting data (without browser) I would get:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xmlns:app='http://www.w3.org/2007/app' xmlns:media='http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/' xmlns:openSearch='http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/' xmlns:gd='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005' xmlns:yt='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007' gd:etag='W/&quot;DUADR347eCp7ImA9Wx5UFkg.&quot;'><id>tag:youtube.com,

Why are the characters changing? And how can I prevent it

BTW to those who are wondering why I'm even bothering to do this - I think that this method gets the data quicker.

Answer 1

The data is being escaped, you need to unescape it. Take a look at:

- (NSString *)stringByReplacingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:(NSStringEncoding)encoding

"BTW to those who are wondering why I'm even bothering to do this - I think that this method gets the data quicker."

Don't prematurely optimize.