NSString with special characters to NSURL

sommeralex wrote:
... I just need to convert my NSString (it is the text of a message having special charcters like &, <, and so on) to add it as parameters to my NSURL request. ...

NSString *encodedParam =
 [dontEncodedString stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

does not solve my problem..

Do you mean the text needs to be part of the URL, or is it added to the body of the request? stringByAddingPercent.. is the correct method for cleaning text embedded in a URL. But if the text is going elsewhere, the special chars need to be handled differently.

It might be helpful if you posted an example of the raw text which is causing the problem, along with the details of where the text is going. In other words, if the text will be part of the URL, show us how the text started out and what the resulting URL looks like. Please add lots of NSLog() statements to your code as well. Try to log the text after each step so we can see what's going on.
- Ray

sommeralex wrote:
My String I want to pass (with json) is
{"lat":"48","long":"16","text":"!@&"}

the generated text is
&message=%7B%22lat%22:%2248%22,%22long%22:%2216%22,%22text%22:%22%3C%3E!@&%22%7D

the method I am using:

NSString *codeMessage = [message stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
tempString = [tempString stringByAppendingFormat:@"&message=%@", codeMessage];
tempString = [tempString stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@" " withString:@""];

It fairly clear that stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding is NOT converting the "&" near the end of your initial string. That means the final result looks like &message=xxx&yyy which is probably not what you want.

How is the original string created, and do the special characters at the end change, or mean something as far as an action that should be taken?

Obviously this is some kind of location, followed by a text field.
If the characters other than the lat/long ("!@&") are static, then I would encode them once, by hand to insure the & is encoded. Another option, if you do not know whether the & is going to appear in the text, is to do:

NSString *codeMessage = [message stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
codeMessage = [codeMessage stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"&" withString:@"%26"];
tempString = [tempString stringByAppendingFormat:@"&message=%@", codeMessage];
tempString = [tempString stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@" " withString:@""];

Obviously the first string substitution needs to be done BEFORE you add the text to "&message=xxx". It's understandable that "&" is not substituted, since you could have "&message=foo&text=bar&etc=more". Maybe Ray or someone else knows if there is a better method to call to change the special characters to hex characters.

However, if this is the only character not getting converted, the extra replacement should solve the problem.

sommeralex wrote:
I think, i am on the way, but still with some stones. For example, I would like to use the € symbol, and the hex list shows 20AC as the code. but 20AC does not work, nor %20AC.

No, that won't work, because you are expecting U+20AC (Unicode) to be encoded as UTF-8 or straight ascii. 0x20AC is the hexadecimal unicode value. %20AC is %20 (a space) followed by AC.

The routine you are using to translate characters, is trying to make them web ready, and there may be a % substitution that will encode ALL characters. I would pull up the documentation page for both the substitution methods, and the % encoding and read the information keeping an eye out for how to do other encodings.

There may well be a UFT-8 encoding for the EURO symbol. I don't know. The encoding you found on the web is for Unicode in general.

The pages I found mentioned a "numerical HTML encoding of the Unicode character" which says to use "&#20AC;" but, that is for encoding it in an HTML document, so it will be displayed properly just like using " " for a non-breaking space.

That doesn't describe how to use if for a HTTP protocol which is what you use to send messages between web servers and other servers.

If you are not going to send the euro symbol via your JSON connection, then it's not a problem.

Hope this helps, even if it doesn't solve your euro issue.
The previous code I gave should work for your & issue.

-Carl