Question

In my iPhone app, I pass email content to the standalone iPhone mail app, but the content is truncated when it contains special characters. It’s the same even if I pre-process the content with stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:.

Answer 1

stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding: will not escape characters that are valid in a URL, such as &. In this case you need to escape them though because otherwise they would be interpreted as part of the URL’s structure (indicating a new parameter) and not as part of the parameter itself. Use CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes instead:

NSString *escaped = [(NSString *)CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(kCFAllocatorDefault,
                                            (CFStringRef)someURLParameter,
                                            NULL,
                                            (CFStringRef)@"!*'();:@&=+$,/?%#[]",
                                            kCFStringEncodingUTF8) autorelease];