Question

I have some code to send a url to a remote server. If I do not encode the url, it works perfectly. But if I encode the url, it does not work. So I am pretty sure something is not right with the way I encode the url query string.

Here is my code:

        // URL TO BE SUBMITTED.
        NSString *urlString = 
        @"http://www.mydomain.com/test.php?";

        // NOW CREATE URL QUERY STRING    
        NSString *unencoded_query_string = 
        @"name=%@&user_id=%@&person_name=%@&person_email=%@&privacy=%@";

// PUT PREVIOUSLY SET VALUES INTO THE QUERY STRING
        NSString *unencoded_url_with_params = 
        [NSString stringWithFormat:unencoded_query_string, business , user_id , name , email , privacy_string]; 

        // ENCODE THE QUERY STRING
        NSString *escapedString = (__bridge_transfer NSString *)CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(
                                                                                      NULL,
                                                                                      (__bridge CFStringRef)unencoded_url_with_params,
                                                                                      NULL,
                                                                                      (CFStringRef)@"!*'();:@&=+$,/?%#[]",
                                                                                      kCFStringEncodingUTF8);

        // NOW APPEND URL TO QUERY STRING
        NSString *full_encoded_url_string = 
        [urlString  stringByAppendingString: escapedString];

and then I send this string to the server, and the server does have the correct request file invoked, but isn’t able to read the parameters.

Would anyone know what I doing incorrectly here? I am using arc by the way.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think you probably want to escape each param, not the entire request. Basically you want to escape ampersands, spaces etc that show up in your get variables. Your encoded URL probably looks like this:

http://www.mydomain.com/test.php?name%3DPeter%20Willsey%26user_id%3DUSERID%26person_name%3DPeter%20Willsey%26person_email%3Dpeter%40test.com%26privacy%3D1

and it should look like this:

http://www.mydomain.com/test.php?name=Peter%20Willsey&user_id=25&person_name=Peter%20Willsey&person_email=peter%40test.com&privacy=1