NSData to NSString encoding returns gibberish

0
votes

I'm downloading html pages through NSURLConnection which gives me NSData representation of the html page at the end. I need to convert this NSData to NSString in order to parse it. My problem is that this page uses special characters like "ě š č ř ž ý á á í é" etc. and when i convert NSData to NSString i get some jibrish like "–ì¬≠" instead of "í" etc. I know the problem is with encoding, but i have no idea how to overcome this problem... I don't know much about encoding but i found that the site uses utf-8 (and those characters are in czech), so i'm really in dead end...

Here is my code :

NSString* docHTML = [[NSString alloc] initWithBytes: [self.receivedData bytes] length:[self.receivedData length] encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding];

Thanks for any help

2
iosencodingnsstringnsdata

2 Answers

3
votes

Your webpage likely does not encode its content in UTF-8. You need to use the same encoding that the webpage did.

EDIT: Also note that receivedBytes isn't valid until the connection has completed. You can't convert data into strings in the middle of didReceiveData.

As a side note, it's easier to use initWithData:encoding: for this.

0
votes

You can try something like:

NSString *docHTML;
docHTML = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:self.receivedData encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding]; 
if (!docHTML)
{
    NSLog(@"ASCII not working, will try utf-8!");
    docHTML = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:self.receivedData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
}
//Do stuff with docHTML

Good luck!