Question

I retrieve names from the database and store their first and last name in an NSMutableDictionary and store those in an NSMutableArray. In the database I have names that have special characters, such as
‘ñ’, ‘Ç’ and of sorts and when I store the name in a variable, it stores , which crashes my program.

I don’t want to restrict the user input, so I have to keep these characters. But is there a work around to retrieving these names with such characters without getting for output?

ConDAO *con = [[ConDAO alloc] init];

NSMutableArray *resultSet = [con executeMySqlCommand:[NSString stringWithFormat:(Long query here)]];

NSMutableDictionary * endList = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init];
[endList setObject: @"" forKey:@"surname"];
[endList setObject: @"" forKey:@"name"];

resultSet =(NSMutableArray *)[resultSet arrayByAddingObject:endList];

for (int i =0; i< [resultSet  count]-1; ++i)
    {
        NSMutableDictionary *temp = (NSMutableDictionary *) [resultSet objectAtIndex:i];

...
}

-(NSMutableArray *) executeMySqlCommand: (NSString *) mysqlCommand{
    LoginData* loginData=[self dataObject]; 
    NSString *post =[NSString stringWithFormat:@"username=%@&password=%@&mysqlCommand=%@",
                     loginData.loginName, loginData.loginPassword, mysqlCommand ];
   NSString *hostStr = @myIP;

    hostStr = [hostStr stringByAppendingString:post];
    NSString *encodeURL =[hostStr stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding: NSASCIIStringEncoding];

    NSData *dataURL =  [NSData dataWithContentsOfURL: [ NSURL URLWithString: encodeURL ]];    

    NSString *serverOutput = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:dataURL encoding: NSASCIIStringEncoding];

    if ([serverOutput length]<=0) return nil;
    NSError * error;
    NSMutableArray *data = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:dataURL options:0 error:&error];
    return data;
}

Answer 1

It was actually a problem of using the .php. The encoding that was used did not cover the special characters, so I had to use UTF8 encoding inside the .php when it makes the DB call.