How to encode a URL in Swift

Question

This is my URL    The problem is  that the address field is not being appended to urlpath   Does anyone know why that is   var address string address    American Tourister  Abids Road  Bogulkunta  Hyderabad  Andhra Pradesh  India  let urlpath   NSString format   http   maps googleapis com maps api geocode json address      address

User · Answer

Swift 4 1  Create a  Character Set  based on the option you want  urlQueryAllowed   Then remove the additional characters you do not want    amp    Then pass that character set to  addingPercentEncoding    var address    American Tourister  Abids Road  Bogulkunta  Hyderabad  Andhra Pradesh  India  var queryCharSet   NSCharacterSet urlQueryAllowed queryCharSet remove charactersIn     amp    let escapedAddress   address addingPercentEncoding withAllowedCharacters  queryCharSet   let urlpath   String format   http   maps googleapis com maps api geocode json address   escapedAddress

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Just completing Desmond Hume s answer to extend the String class for a RFC 3986 unreserved characters valid encoding function  needed if you are encoding query FORM parameters    Swift 3  extension String        var RFC3986UnreservedEncoded String           let unreservedChars    ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-             let unreservedCharsSet  CharacterSet   CharacterSet charactersIn  unreservedChars          let encodedString  String   self addingPercentEncoding withAllowedCharacters  unreservedCharsSet           return encodedString

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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

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Swift 4 2  var urlString   originalString addingPercentEncoding withAllowedCharacters   urlQueryAllowed    Swift 3 0  var address    American Tourister  Abids Road  Bogulkunta  Hyderabad  Andhra Pradesh  India  let escapedAddress   address addingPercentEncoding withAllowedCharacters  CharacterSet urlQueryAllowed  let urlpath   String format   http   maps googleapis com maps api geocode json address   escapedAddress      Use stringByAddingPercentEncodingWithAllowedCharacters    var escapedAddress   address stringByAddingPercentEncodingWithAllowedCharacters NSCharacterSet URLQueryAllowedCharacterSet        Use stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding  Deprecated in iOS 9 and OS X v10 11  var address    American Tourister  Abids Road  Bogulkunta  Hyderabad  Andhra Pradesh  India  var escapedAddress   address stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding NSUTF8StringEncoding  let urlpath   NSString format   http   maps googleapis com maps api geocode json address   escapedAddress

User · Answer

URLQueryAllowedCharacterSet should not be used for URL encoding of query parameters because this charset includes  amp        etc  which serve as delimiters in a URL query  e g    paramname paramvalue amp paramname paramvalue  These characters are allowed in URL queries as a whole but not in parameter values  RFC 3986 specifically talks about unreserved characters  which are different from allowed   2 3   Unreserved Characters Characters that are allowed in a URI but do not have a reserved purpose are called unreserved   These include uppercase and lowercase letters  decimal digits  hyphen  period  underscore  and tilde    unreserved    ALPHA   DIGIT    quot - quot     quot   quot     quot   quot     quot   quot    Accordingly  extension String       var URLEncoded String           var URLEncoded String       let unreservedChars    quot ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-    quot      let unreservedCharsSet  CharacterSet   CharacterSet charactersIn  unreservedChars      let encodedString   self addingPercentEncoding withAllowedCharacters  unreservedCharsSet       return encodedString            The code above doesn t make a call to alphanumericCharacterSet because of the enormous size of the charset it returns  103806 characters   And in view of how many Unicode characters alphanumericCharacterSet allows for  using it for the purpose of URL encoding would be simply erroneous  Usage  let URLEncodedString   myString URLEncoded

User · Answer

If it s possible that the value that you re adding to your URL can have reserved characters  as defined by section 2 of RFC 3986   you might have to refine your percent-escaping  Notably  while  amp  and   are valid characters in a URL  they re not valid within a URL query parameter value  because  amp  is used as delimiter between query parameters which would prematurely terminate your value  and   is translated to a space character   Unfortunately  the standard percent-escaping leaves those delimiters unescaped   Thus  you might want to percent escape all characters that are not within RFC 3986 s list of unreserved characters       Characters that are allowed in a URI but do not have a reserved      purpose are called unreserved   These include uppercase and lowercase      letters  decimal digits  hyphen  period  underscore  and tilde         unreserved    ALPHA   DIGIT    -                       Later  in section 3 4  the RFC further contemplates adding   and   to the list of allowed characters within a query      The characters slash       and question mark       may represent data      within the query component   Beware that some older  erroneous      implementations may not handle such data correctly when it is used as      the base URI for relative references  Section 5 1   apparently      because they fail to distinguish query data from path data when      looking for hierarchical separators  However  as query components      are often used to carry identifying information in the form of       key value  pairs and one frequently used value is a reference to      another URI  it is sometimes better for usability to avoid percent-      encoding those characters    Nowadays  you d generally use URLComponents to percent escape the query value   var address    American Tourister  Abids Road  Bogulkunta  Hyderabad  Andhra Pradesh  India  var components   URLComponents string   http   maps googleapis com maps api geocode json    components queryItems    URLQueryItem name   address   value  address   let url   components url      By the way  while it s not contemplated in the aforementioned RFC  section 5 2  URL-encoded form data  of the W3C HTML spec says that application x-www-form-urlencoded requests should also replace space characters with   characters  and includes the asterisk in the characters that should not be escaped   And  unfortunately  URLComponents won t properly percent escape this  so Apple advises that you manually percent escape it before retrieving the url property of the URLComponents object      configure  components  as shown above  and then   components percentEncodedQuery   components percentEncodedQuery  replacingOccurrences of       with    2B   let url   components url    For Swift 2 rendition  where I manually do all of this percent escaping myself  see the previous revision of this answer

User · Answer

Swift 2 0  let needsLove    string needin some URL love  let safeURL   needsLove stringByAddingPercentEncodingWithAllowedCharacters NSCharacterSet URLQueryAllowedCharacterSet       Helpful Progamming Tips and Hacks

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Swift 3   let escapedString   originalString addingPercentEncoding withAllowedCharacters NSCharacterSet urlQueryAllowed

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XCODE 8  SWIFT 3 0   From grokswift  Creating URLs from strings is a minefield for bugs  Just miss a single   or accidentally URL encode the   in a query and your API call will fail and your app won   t have any data to display  or even crash if you didn   t anticipate that possibility   Since iOS 8 there   s a better way to build URLs using NSURLComponents and NSURLQueryItems    func createURLWithComponents   - gt  URL        var urlComponents   URLComponents       urlComponents scheme    http      urlComponents host    maps googleapis com      urlComponents path     maps api geocode json       let addressQuery   URLQueryItem name   address   value   American Tourister  Abids Road  Bogulkunta  Hyderabad  Andhra Pradesh  India       urlComponents queryItems    addressQuery       return urlComponents url     Below is the code to access url using guard statement   guard let url   createURLWithComponents   else               print  invalid URL               return nil               print url    Output    http   maps googleapis com maps api geocode json address American 20Tourister  20Abids 20Road  20Bogulkunta  20Hyderabad  20Andhra 20Pradesh  20India   Read More  Building URLs With NSURLComponents and NSURLQueryItems

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Adding to Bryan Chen s answer above   Just incase anyone else is getting something similar with Alamofire       error  Alamofire was compiled with optimization - stepping may behave   oddly  variables may not be available    It s not a very descriptive error  I was getting that error when constructing a URL for google geo services  I was appending a street address to the end of the URL WITHOUT encoding the street address itself first   I was able to fix it using Bryan Chen s solution   var streetAdress    123 fake street  new york  ny  var escapedStreetAddress   streetAddress stringByAddingPercentEncodingWithAllowedCharacters  URLHostAllowedCharacterSet    let url      self baseUrl  amp address   escapedAddress      That fixed it for me  It didnt like that the address had spaces and commas  etc   Hope this helps someone else

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I needed to encode my parameters with ISO-8859-1  so the addingPercentEncoding   method doesn t work for me  I made a solution my self in Swift 4   extension String         Url percent encoding according to RFC3986 specifications      https   tools ietf org html rfc3986 section-2 1   func urlPercentEncoded withAllowedCharacters allowedCharacters       CharacterSet  encoding  String Encoding  - gt  String       var returnStr              Compute each char seperatly     for char in self         let charStr   String char        let charScalar   charStr unicodeScalars charStr unicodeScalars startIndex        if allowedCharacters contains charScalar     false          let bytesOfChar   charStr data using  encoding               Get the hexStr of every notAllowed-char-byte and put a   infront of it  append the result to the returnString         for byte in bytesOfChar             returnStr          String format    02hhX   byte as CVarArg                    else           returnStr    charStr                    return returnStr          Usage    aou         urlPercentEncoded withAllowedCharacters   urlQueryAllowed                                           encoding   isoLatin1      Results in - gt   aou E4 F6 FC

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In my case where the last component was non latin characters I did the following in Swift 2 2   extension String    func encodeUTF8   - gt  String      If I can create an NSURL out of the string nothing is wrong with it if let     NSURL string  self         return self      Get the last component from the string this will return subSequence let optionalLastComponent   self characters split    0          last   if let lastComponent   optionalLastComponent          Get the string from the sub sequence by mapping the characters to  String  then reduce the array to String     let lastComponentAsString   lastComponent map   String  0    reduce     combine             Get the range of the last component     if let rangeOfLastComponent   self rangeOfString lastComponentAsString              Get the string without its last component         let stringWithoutLastComponent   self substringToIndex rangeOfLastComponent startIndex              Encode the last component         if let lastComponentEncoded   lastComponentAsString stringByAddingPercentEncodingWithAllowedCharacters NSCharacterSet alphanumericCharacterSet                  Finally append the original string  without its last component  to the encoded part  encoded last component          let encodedString   stringWithoutLastComponent   lastComponentEncoded                Return the string  original string encoded string              return encodedString                    return nil

User · Answer

Updated for Swift 3   var escapedAddress   address addingPercentEncoding      withAllowedCharacters  CharacterSet urlQueryAllowed

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