Question

Apologies if this has been answered already. There are similar topics but none that I could find pertaining to Cocoa & NSStrings...

I m constructing a clickable URL to embed in an HTML email to be sent via the MFMailComposeViewController on the iPhone. i create the url then use stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding to polish up white space, etc. then add some surrounding HTML to get:

<a href = "http://www.site.com/viewitem?name=Johnny%20Rotten&age=53&mate=sid%20vicious">view</a>

All s well so it s appended to emailBody. However once [mailComposer setMessageBody:emailBody isHTML:YES] all the & become & which isn t ideal within my URL.

can i control this? is there a better encoding algorithm? my HTML is a bit rusty perhaps I m using the wrong encoding? I m sure on the server I could parse the & back into & but looking for the Cocoa way...

Thanks!

Answer 1

Actually, & should always be encoded as & in HTML attributes. Including links. Including form value delimiters. So it s done exactly what you want, even though you didn t know you wanted it.

Look at it this way: in your URL, you have &age=53... That s interpreted first as a character entity, and only after that doesn t work is it interpreted as an ampersand followed by more character data.

The W3C spec is quite clear on this:

Authors should use "&" (ASCII decimal 38) instead of "&" to avoid confusion with the beginning of a character reference (entity reference open delimiter). Authors should also use "&" in attribute values since character references are allowed within CDATA attribute values.

That should settle it: use & not &.

Answer 2

Are you calling MFMailComposeViewController s

setMessageBody:isHTML:

and what do you set isHTML to?

Depending on it s setting it might very well be that MFMailComposeViewController is trying to help you out be encoding the entire message body...

Either don t encode the body yourself or make the entire body HTML.

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