Question

I have UTF-8 encoded NSData from windows server and I want to convert it to NSString for iPhone. Since data contains characters (like a degree symbol) which have different values on both platforms, how do I convert data to string?

Answer 1

If the data is not null-terminated, you should use -initWithData:encoding:

NSString* newStr = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:theData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

If the data is null-terminated, you should instead use -stringWithUTF8String: to avoid the extra \0 at the end.

NSString* newStr = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:[theData bytes]];

(Note that if the input is not properly UTF-8-encoded, you will get nil.)

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Swift variant:

let newStr = String(data: data, encoding: .utf8)
// note that `newStr` is a `String?`, not a `String`.

If the data is null-terminated, you could go though the safe way which is remove the that null character, or the unsafe way similar to the Objective-C version above.

// safe way, provided data is \0-terminated
let newStr1 = String(data: data.subdata(in: 0 ..< data.count - 1), encoding: .utf8)
// unsafe way, provided data is \0-terminated
let newStr2 = data.withUnsafeBytes(String.init(utf8String:))