How do I URL encode a string

Question

I have a URL string (NSString) with spaces and & characters. How do I url encode the entire string (including the & ampersand

Answer 1

I faced a similar problem passing complex strings as a POST parameter. My strings can contain Asian characters, spaces, quotes and all sorts of special characters. The solution I eventually found was to convert my string into the matching series of unicodes, e.g. "Hu0040Hu0020Hu03f5...." using [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Hu%04x",[string characterAtIndex:i]] to get the Unicode from each character in the original string. The same can be done in Java.

This string can be safely passed as a POST parameter.

On the server side (PHP), I change all the "H" to "\" and I pass the resulting string to json_decode. Final step is to escape single quotes before storing the string into MySQL.

This way I can store any UTF8 string on my server.