In Mac OS 10.9 Maverics and iOS 7 NSURLComponents
has been introduced which handles the encoding of the different URL parts in a pretty convenient way.
The NSURLComponents class is a class that is designed to parse URLs based on RFC 3986 and to construct URLs from their constituent parts. Its behavior differs subtly from the NSURL class, which conforms to older RFCs. However, you can easily obtain an NSURL object based on the contents of a URL components object or vice versa.
let address = "American Tourister, Abids Road, Bogulkunta, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India"
let components = NSURLComponents(string: "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json")!
// create a query item key=value
let queryItem = NSURLQueryItem(name: "address", value: address)
// add the query item to the URL, NSURLComponents takes care of adding the question mark.
components.queryItems = [queryItem]
// get the properly percent encoded string
let urlpath = components.string!
print(urlpath)