doc file created in iPhone documents encoding issue

Question

I'm trying to write a MSword file in document directory by the following code:

NSArray* paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory , NSUserDomainMask, YES);
NSString* path;
NSString* gradeDoc = [self fetchCommentsDesc];
NSString* str = [self.objStudent.strName stringByAppendingFormat:@".doc"];
path = [[paths objectAtIndex:0] stringByAppendingPathComponent:str];
[gradeDoc writeToFile:path atomically:YES encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:nil];

[self fetchCommentsDesc] returns NSString.
self.student.strName is a String

Issue: When i Open the doc file created in document directory of iphone, all the special characters in the doc appears as boxes or some arabic chars.

Please help!

Answer 1

You're writing some UTF-8 bytes, which is not a ".doc". Try writing it to a ".txt" file.

Also, you may have to write a "byte order mark" for some text editors to notice that it's UTF-8 or UTF-16 (in NS/CF-land, this is known as an "external representation"):

NSData * d = [(id)CFStringCreateExternalRepresentation(NULL, (CFStringRef)gradeDoc, kCFStringEncodingUTF8, 0) autorelease];
[d writeToFile:path atomically:YES];

Also try kCFStringEncodingUnicode and kCFStringEncodingUTF16.