Question

I’m trying to feed Mail.app some simple html: lists, bold font, some italics. However, I noticed that if I use characters like £, then Mail.app just doesn’t show anything. I realized I need to convert to HTML entities, like £ (full list here: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp). I have a partial solution that works for most characters my users have come up with, but it’s far from being a solid fix:

- (NSString*) makeValidHTML:(NSString*)str {
  str = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"£" withString:@"£"];
  str = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"¢" withString:@"¢"];
  str = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"¥" withString:@"¥"];
  str = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"©" withString:@"©"];
  str = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"®" withString:@"®"];
  str = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"°" withString:@"°"];
  str = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"¿" withString:@"¿"];
  str = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"¡" withString:@"¡"];
  str = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"‘" withString:@"'"];
  str = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"'" withString:@"'"];
  str = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"&" withString:@"&"];
  str = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"\"" withString:@"""];
  str = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"“" withString:@"""];
  str = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"<" withString:@"&lt;"];
  str = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@">" withString:@"&gt;"];
  return str;
}

Is there a standard way to do this without having to list every possible reserved character?

Answer 1

This class should be helpful to you:
https://github.com/mwaterfall/MWFeedParser/blob/master/Classes/NSString+HTML.m

Link retrieved from this other SO answer:
Converting & to & in Objective-C