Question

I am constructing a data packet to be sent over NSStream to a server. I am trying to seperate two pieces of data with the a ‘§’ (ascii code 167). This is the way the server is built, so I need to try to stay within those bounds…

unichar asciiChar = 167;  //yields @"§"
[self setSepString:[NSString stringWithCharacters:&asciiChar length:1]]; 

sendData=[NSString stringWithFormat:@"USER User%@Pass", sepString];

NSLog(sendData);

const uint8_t *rawString=(const uint8_t *)[sendData UTF8String];

[oStream write:rawString maxLength:[sendData length]];  

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So the final outcome should look like this.. and it does when sendData is first constructed:

USER User§Pass 

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however, when it is received on the server side, it looks like this:

//not a direct copy and paste. The 'mystery character' may not be exact
USER UserˤPas

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…the seperator string has become two in length, and the last letter is getting cropped from the command. I believe this to be cause by the UTF8 conversion.

Can anyone shed some light on this for me?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

The correct encoding in UTF-8 for this character is the two-byte sequence 0xC2 0xA7, which is what you’re getting. (Fileformat.info is invaluable for this stuff.) This is out of the LATIN-1 set, so you almost certainly want to be using NSISOLatin1StringEncoding rather than NSUTF8StringEncoding in order to get a single-byte 167 encoding. Look at NSString -dataUsingEncoding:.