Encoding issue: Cocoa Error 261?

Question

So I\'m fetching a JSON string from a php script in my iPhone app using:

NSURL *baseURL = [NSURL URLWithString:@\"test.php\"];
NSError *encodeError = [[NSError a         


        

Answer 1

I'm surprised no one has mentioned using a different encoding value instead of NSUTF8StringEncoding when calling [NSString stringWithContentsOfFile:encoding:error:].

I also got Cocoa error 261 when parsing a JSON file. I just went through the list of NSString encodings until one worked. Fortunately the first one worked for me: NSASCIIStringEncoding!

You can also use NSString stringWithContentsOfFile:usedEncoding:error: to try to find the correct encoding (as described here: How to use stringWithContentsOfURL:encoding:error:?).

Answer 2

What helped me was just to change the physical file encoding to UTF-8. My editor had set it to the default, MacRoman, and didn't like letters with accents.

Answer 3

For future reference, if you need to override the encoding, and you're working with streams without embedded NULs, something like this might be good (I've just written a rough sketch outline here, check this code is and does want you want before using it):

NSHTTPURLResponse* resp=nil;
NSData* jsonAsImmutableData = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:
  [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://<whatever>"]]
  returningResponse:&resp error:NULL];

NSMutableData*modifiedData = [NSMutableData dataWithData:jsonAsImmutableData];

char extraNulls[7] =
  {0,0,0,0,0,0,0}; // is this defensive enough for your encoding?
[modifiedData appendBytes:extraNulls length:7];

NSString* jsonAsString = [NSString stringWithCString:[modifiedData bytes]
  encoding:<whatever your encoding is>];

But I expect your best course of action is to check that your server is both using and claiming to use UTF-8 encoding or some other Apple iPhone supported encoding.

EDIT

altered code comment.

Answer 4

Encoding issue: Cocoa Error 261? I solved this issue by trying different encoding. First I was using NSUTF8 then I switched to NSASCIIStringEncoding and it worked.

NSString* path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource: @"fileName" ofType: @"type"];
NSData* data = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:path];
NSString *string = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:data encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];
NSLog(@"%@",string);

Answer 5

Don't know if this is your problem, but I just had a similar thing (stringWithContentsOfFile, no JSON), and the problem was that the file had CRLF (windows) line-endings and Western-whatever-it's-called encoding. I used SubEthaEdit to convert to LF (Mac/Unix line-endings) and UTF-8 encoding, and now everything works fine.