Question

Writing an iPhone app, and I’m getting my data from a REST API that returns JSON. My problem is, some of the data has special characters embedded and I’m getting errors. Example:

MartÌn
Petite-RiviËre-Saint-FranÁois

Here is my current code:

NSString *jsonString = [[NSString alloc] 
                            initWithData:receivedData 
                            encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSMutableArray *tempResults = [[[jsonString JSONValue] 
                            objectForKey:@"getRegionResortsLastUpdatedResponse"] 
                            objectForKey:@"return"];

Whenever the data has special characters in it "jsonString" return "(null)", otherwise everything works fine.

Is this something I can handle on my end, or does the API need to be modified to output the character codes?

Answer 1

If -initWithData:encoding: returns nil, your data is almost certainly not encoded in the requested encoding. I suspect you’re not sending UTF8, and are rather sending some other encoding such as one of the Windows code pages or Latin1. See String Encoding in the NSString documentation.