Encrypted twitter feed

Question

I'm developing an iOS application , that will take a twits from twitter, I'm using the following API

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?include_entities=true&include_rts=true&count=2&screen_name=TareqAlSuwaidan

The problem are feed in Arabic Language , i.e the text feed appears like this

\u0623\u0646\u0643 \u0648\u0627\u0647\u0645

How can i get the real text (or how to encode this to get real text) ?

Answer 1

This is not encrypted, it is unicode. The codes 0600 - 06ff is Arabic. NSString handles unicode.

Here is an example:

NSString *string = @"\u0623\u0646\u0643 \u0648\u0627\u0647\u0645";
NSLog(@"string: '%@'", string);

NSLog output:

string: 'أنك واهم'

The only question is exactly what problem are you seeing, are you getting the Arabic text? Are you using NSJSONSerialization to deserialize the JSON? If so there should be no problem.

Here is an example with the question URL (don't use synchronous requests in production code):

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?include_entities=true&include_rts=true&count=2&screen_name=TareqAlSuwaidan"];
NSData *data = [NSData dataWithContentsOfURL:url];

NSError *error;
NSArray *jsonObject = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:data options:NSJSONReadingMutableContainers error:&error];
NSDictionary *object1 = [jsonObject objectAtIndex:0];
NSString *text = [object1 objectForKey:@"text"];
NSLog(@"text: '%@'", text);

NSLog output:

text: '@Naser_Albdya أيدت الثورة السورية منذ بدايتها وارجع لليوتوب واكتب( سوريا السويدان )

Answer 2

Those are Unicode literals. I think all that's needed is to use NSString's stringWithUTF8String: method on the string you have. That should use NSString's native Unicode handling to convert the literals to the actual characters. Example:

NSString *directFromTwitter = [twitterInterface getTweet];
// directFromTwitter contains "\u0623\u0646\u0643 \u0648\u0627\u0647\u0645"
NSString *encodedString = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:[directFromTwitter UTF8String]];
// encodedString contains "أنك واهم", or something like it

The method call inside the conversion call ([directFromTwitter UTF8String]) is to get access to the raw bytes of the string, that are used by stringWithUTF8String. I'm not exactly sure on what those code points come out to, I just relied on Python to do the conversion.