Objective C HTML escape/unescape

Question

Wondering if there is an easy way to do a simple HTML escape/unescape in Objective C. What I want is something like this psuedo code:

NSString *string = @\"         


        

Answer 1

This is an incredibly hacked together solution I did, but if you want to simply escape a string without worrying about parsing, do this:

-(NSString *)htmlEntityDecode:(NSString *)string
    {
        string = [string stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@""" withString:@"\""];
        string = [string stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"'" withString:@"'"];
        string = [string stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"<" withString:@"<"];
        string = [string stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@">" withString:@">"];
        string = [string stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"&" withString:@"&"]; // Do this last so that, e.g. @"&lt;" goes to @"<" not @"<"

        return string;
    }

I know it's by no means elegant, but it gets the job done. You can then decode an element by calling:

string = [self htmlEntityDecode:string];

Like I said, it's hacky but it works. IF you want to encode a string, just reverse the stringByReplacingOccurencesOfString parameters.