Question

could somebody please tell me why this code fails. url is nil after calling initWithString. The variable documentsDirectory is being populated successfully.

NSArray   *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);
NSString  *documentsDirectory = [paths lastObject];  
NSURL* url =   [[NSURL alloc]initWithString:documentsDirectory];  

Thanks

Answer 1

From the documentation:

Parameters
URLString
The string with which to initialize the NSURL object. This string must conform to URL format as described in RFC 2396. This method parses URLString according to RFCs 1738 and 1808.

This means that special characters must be properly escaped (space becomes %20, etc);

OR

simply do:

NSURL *url = [[NSURL alloc] initFileURLWithPath:documentsDirectory];