NSString with emoticons/emojis url encode

Question

I am trying to take the contents of a UITextField that may contain special characters and emojis and turn it into something I can pass in a GET request to a PHP service.

Answer 1

Use this to escape emoji:

NSString *escapedEmoji = [NSString stringWithCString:[emojiString cStringUsingEncoding:NSNonLossyASCIIStringEncoding] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

And this to unescape emoji:

NSString *unescapedEmoji = [NSString stringWithCString:[escapedString cStringUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] encoding:NSNonLossyASCIIStringEncoding];