How to use special character in NSURL?

Question

My application is using an NSURL like this:

var url = NSURL(string: "http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=Aïn+Béïda+Algeria&country=")

When I tried to make a task for getting data from this NSURL like this:

    let task = NSURLSession.sharedSession().dataTaskWithURL(url!, completionHandler: { (data: NSData!, response: NSURLResponse!, error: NSError!) -> Void in

        if error == nil {

            var urlContent = NSString(data: data, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding)
            println("urlContent \(urlContent!)")
        } else {

            println("error mode")
        }

but I got error when trying to got data from that address, although when I using safari go to link: "http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=Aïn+Béïda+Algeria&country=" I can see the data. How can I fix that?

Answer 1

Swift 2

let original = "http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=Aïn+Béïda+Algeria&country="
if let encodedString = original.stringByAddingPercentEncodingWithAllowedCharacters(
    NSCharacterSet.URLFragmentAllowedCharacterSet()),
    url = NSURL(string: encodedString) 
{
    print(url)
}

Encoded URL is now:

"http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=A%C3%AFn+B%C3%A9%C3%AFda+Algeria&country="

and is compatible with NSURLSession.

Swift 3

let original = "http://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=Aïn+Béïda+Algeria&country="
if let encoded = original.addingPercentEncoding(withAllowedCharacters: .urlFragmentAllowed),
    let url = URL(string: encoded)
{
    print(url)
}