Ios: Issue with Ampersand in the Url String

Pass string with ampersand (&) from iOS to PHP/MySQL with NSURLSession

Typically for a webrequest like that it uses % followed by the ascii hex value. The hex value for & is 26, so it would be %26

google.com/#q=red%26white is example of a google search for red&white, which uses that replacement

Its called URL encoding or percent encoding and here is another question with an answer on how to do more broad URL encoding: stackoverflow.com/questions/24551816/swift-encode-url

Note that you would have to URL encode each element you were interpolating into the string, not the whole result string, as you want to keep your &'s that separate parameters.

Encode NSURL when query params contain ampersand

I found the solution, and it was with NSURLComponents - at this point a completely undocumented class added in iOS7.

NSURLComponents *components = [NSURLComponents new];
components.scheme = @"http";
components.host = @"myurl.com";
components.path = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@/mypath/%@", @"/mobile_dev/api", user_id];
components.percentEncodedQuery = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"name=%@", [term urlEncodeUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];

NSURL *fullURL = [components URL];

By using components.percentEncodedQuery, the term element uses the encoding I put on it, and apple doesn't touch it.

Hopefully this helps someone else.

Posting any text with ampersand & back to web service is causing issues

This happens when you try to pass some values in the URL and the value contains & which is used to separate parameters in the URL, hence the web server spilts the content into parts wherever it encounters an & rather than taking it as a single continuos value.

You can url encode the string to resolve the problem.

NSString *valueToSubmit = @"This is my value which contains & in it.";
NSString *urlEncodedString  = (NSString*)CFBridgingRelease(CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(NULL,(CFStringRef)valueToSubmit,NULL,(CFStringRef)@"!*'();:@&=+$,/?%#[]",kCFStringEncodingUTF8));
NSLog(@"Non-Encoded: %@ \n Encoded: %@",valueToSubmit,urlEncodedString];

The output will be something like this:


Non-Encoded: This is my value which contains & in it.
URL Encoded: This%20is%20my%20value%20which%20contains%20%26%20in%20it.

Problem with RegExKitLite and ampersands

In ICU regular expression character classes, & means intersection. For example @"[[:letter:] & [a-z]]". So it needs to be quoted as Peter suggestion, with a backslash, ie \& in the regular expression. However, \ has a special meaning in C strings, including Objective C strings. So the \ has to itself be quoted with . So you need \& in your pattern. Ie, [-a-zA-Z0-9+\&@#/%?=~_()|!:,.;]

Also, I'm not sure what your intention is with the ^ at the start of the URL. If you want the regex to match anywhere in the string, you should use \b (word break) instead. If you want it to match URLs that are only at the start of the message, then you would only ever get a single match as written. If you want it to match URLs that are at the start of a line, then add (?m) at the start of the regex to turn on multiline matching for ^ (and consider adding $ to the end of the regex).

NSXMLParser problem with &(Ampersand) character

Replace

NSString *str = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:downloadedData encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];
//NSString *contentString = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"&" withString:@"&"];
NSData * data=[str dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

With:

NSString *str = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:downloadedData encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];
NSString *contentString = [str stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"&" withString:@"&"];
NSData * data=[contentString dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];