Question

I’m having trouble displaying an image in a UIWebView.

• I retrieve html content from a feed.

• In this content there is a <img src=.../> tag.

• Loading this content into a UIWebview, the image doesn’t display, showing only the missing image “?” instead.

It seems that the link to the image in src= contains some interesting characters and that these need to be escaped in order to get the correct image.

For example, in the feed I get the following which doesn’t work:

<img src="http://www.somedomain.com/0,,10268~9189636,00-1.jpg" />

However, if I use the following escaped link, it does work:

<img src="http://www.somedomain.com/0%2C%2C10268%7E9189636%2C00-1.jpg" />

The problem then arises that if I escape the html content (using the Google gtm_stringByEscapingForHTML function, for example), the whole lot gets escaped and the UIWebview just ends up displaying the html as a string of html. For example:

"<p>Hello this is a test</p><img src="someimagesource.jpg"/>......"

I actually used to be able to see the images, but can’t prove that something has changed at the back end. I haven’t changed anything at the front end.

I guess my questions are, therefore:

1. Can anyone shed any more light on the potential cause of this issue?
2. Can anyone suggest a fix I can apply at the front end to get around this issue?

Thanks very much in advance for your help.

Answer 1

The issue was indeed with the back end. I performed multiple tests and discovered that the images worked when hosted on my own server. I then found out that for mobile Safari, the back end was redirecting requests to a mobile site. This meant that requests for images on their server that came from mobile WebKit were being redirected to an html page. Of course, an html page is not a valid src for an img tag…