Last Updated: February 25, 2016
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990
· adamyanalunas

Proper URL path escaping in Cocoa

Don't do this:

NSString *escaped = [path stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

Do this:

CFStringRef escaped = CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(NULL,
                                                          (CFStringRef)path,
                                                          NULL,
                                                          CFSTR(";?#"),
                                                          kCFStringEncodingUTF8);

2 Responses
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Why?

over 1 year ago ·

Because stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding alone does not strictly conform to what can be escaped in arguments and you may end up with skipped, unencoded characters in your string. That would result in a malformed URL with incorrect parameters.

That would result in great sadness. And probably sadness as well.

over 1 year ago ·