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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T11:47:50+00:00

I could not really find this in the documentation. I’m writing some unit tests

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I could not really find this in the documentation.

I’m writing some unit tests and one of the tests that is supposed to fail is [NSURL URLWithString: @"cow"]. Because cow is not a valid URL.

However, it is happily parsed by NSURL with no errors at all. It does not return nil and it does not throw an exception. Calling [url absoluteString] on it turns it back into @"cow".

What is going on here? Is NSURL really supposed to allow this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    NSURL allows relative URLs, which would include “cow”.

    The general form of a URI given in RFC 2396 allows relative references:

    URI-reference = [ absoluteURI | relativeURI ] [ "#" fragment ]
relativeURI   = ( net_path | abs_path | rel_path ) [ "?" query ]
rel_path      = rel_segment [ abs_path ]
rel_segment   = 1*( unreserved | escaped |
                      ";" | "@" | "&" | "=" | "+" | "$" | "," )

    Unless I’m misreading horribly, this means any sequence of valid characters can form a valid relative URL.

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