Question

I’m parsing an RSS feed and storing each item in a dictionary and each one of these in an array. This all works fine, but when I try and open a link from the feed nothing happens, the URL appears to be correct as I have NSLogged it when pressing the button, I have remove whitespace, newlines and tabs from the URL, but am unsure weather I have done this correctly. Any Ideas?

I know the initial parsing and storage is fine as I am using other elements in other parts of the program so I will just show the code directly involved with the problem.

Formatting the URL

libraryRSSString = [[stories objectAtIndex: 0] objectForKey: @"link"];
[libraryRSSString stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"   " withString:@""];
[libraryRSSString stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]];

and the action for opening the link, I will mention now that the action works when hardcoding the link, as in @”http://www.google.com”;

-(IBAction)LibraryRSSAction{

       [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:libraryRSSString]];

       NSLog(@"button pressed");

       NSLog(@"the link is %@",libraryRSSString);

}

Answer 1

You are encoding the url in a wrong way, try this.

EDIT (To include the code on the link above):

Create a category named “NSString+URLEncoding”, files NSString+URLEncoding.h and NSString+URLEncoding.m.

NSString+URLEncoding.h:

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
@interface NSString (URLEncoding)
-(NSString *)urlEncodeUsingEncoding:(NSStringEncoding)encoding;
@end

NSString+URLEncoding.m:

#import "NSString+URLEncoding.h"
@implementation NSString (URLEncoding)
-(NSString *)urlEncodeUsingEncoding:(NSStringEncoding)encoding {
    return (NSString *)CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(NULL,
               (CFStringRef)self,
               NULL,
               (CFStringRef)@"!*'\"();:@&=+$,/?%#[]% ",
               CFStringConvertNSStringEncodingToEncoding(encoding));
}
@end

Now import the file NSString+URLEncoding.h on the file you want to use the method and just do libraryRSSString = [[[stories objectAtIndex: 0] objectForKey: @"link"] urlEncodeUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];