I have been working on a simple text editor in Cocoa/Objective-C for a practice project, and I have come across an error that I would never have expected.
I have an NSString for my file's contents as well as an NSString for it's path. When I attempt to write the contents to a file, I use the following method:
[FileContents writeToFile: CurrentFileName
atomically: NO
encoding: NSStringEncoding /* Error occurs on this line */
error: nil];
I've used this method many times without error yet today, I am getting an error:
Expected expression before 'NSStringEncoding'
NSStringEncoding isn't a valid value. You need to decide what text encoding to use. If you don't know anything about text encodings and these files are only used by your program, I would recommend using NSUTF8StringEncoding everywhere.
UTF-8 has many benefits, including that it is plain ASCII if you don't encounter any non-ASCII characters.
NSStringEncoding is a type, not a value. You need to specify which NSStringEncoding you want (e.g. NSUTF8StringEncoding, NSASCIIStringEncoding and so on).
Related
First off, I'm not exactly sure what is happening or if I fully understand it enough to describe the issue so I'll try my best.
I'm encoding a NSData object that contains json and one of the objects contains a degree symbol. We believe this what is causing the issue and would like to remove it before encoding since the problem occurs during encoding.
I have plenty of options out there for removing certain characters from strings but none from doing it from the NSData object itself. Wondering if this is even possible or if its an issue with how I'm already encoding it.
This is how the NSData object is being encoded and turned back into a NSData object to serialize it to json. Right now I'm not trying to remove the degree symbol, using Latin 1 because another character I want to use but do not need it, this probably isn't the best way to do but it works for majority of other data objects that pass through it just not this one so this needs to change.
NSString* stringISOLatin1 = [NSString stringWithCString:data.bytes encoding:NSISOLatin1StringEncoding];
NSData* dataUTF8 = [stringISOLatin1 dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding allowLossyConversion:NO];
The results are a little weird, most of the time it works fine, even including the degree symbol in the text when displayed on screen. Other times after encoding the string comes back messed up at the end which makes it unable to be serialized.
Any help would be appreciated even if it just leads to a better explanation of what is happen. Thanks
The problem is likely that you are using NSString:stringWithCString:encoding: to convert your data object. This function requires the data to be null terminated. NSData objects do not have to be NULL terminated because they have an explicit length. If the NULL character is missing it will continue to read whatever there happens to be after the string, giving you either garbage at the end or possibly crash because of memory violation.
Instead try using this:
NSString *stringISOLatin1 = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:data encoding:NSISOLatin1StringEncoding];
I am converting the response data from a web request to an NSString in the following manner:
NSData *data = self.responseData;
if (!data) {
return nil;
}
NSStringEncoding encoding = CFStringConvertEncodingToNSStringEncoding(CFStringConvertIANACharSetNameToEncoding((__bridge CFStringRef)[self.response textEncodingName]));
NSString *responseString = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:data encoding:encoding];
However the resulting string looks like this:
"birthday":"04\/01\/1990",
"email":"some.address\u0040some.domain.com"
What I would like is
"birthday":"04/01/1990",
"email":"some.address#some.domain.com"
without the backslash escapes and unicode. What is the cleanest way to do this?
The response seems to be JSON-encoded. So simply decode the response string using a JSON library (SBJson, JsonKit etc.) to get the correct form.
You can replace (or remove) characters using NSString's stringByReplacingCharactersInRange:withString: or stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:withString:.
To remove (convert) unicode characters, use dataUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding allowLossyConversion:YES (from this answer).
I'm sorry if the following has nothing to do with your case: Personally, I would ask myself where did that back-slashes come from in the first place. For example, for JSON, I'd know that some sort of JSON serializer on the other side escapes some characters (so the slashes are really there, in the response, and that is not a some weird bug in Cocoa). That way I'd able to tell for sure which characters I have to handle and how. Or maybe I'd use some kind of library to do that for me.
I am using data that involves Chinese Unihan characters in an Objective-C app. I am using a voice recognition program (cmusphinx) that returns a phrase from my data. It returns UTF-8 characters and when returning a Chinese character (which is three bytes) it separates it into three separate characters.
Example: When I want 人 to, I see: ‰∫∫. This is the proper in coding (E4 BA BA), but my code sees the returned value as three seperate characters rather than one.
Actually, my function is receiving the phrase as an NSString, (due to a wrap around) which uses UTF-16. I tried using Objective-C's built in conversion methods (to UTF-8 and from UTF-16), but these keep my string as three characters.
How can I decode these three separate characters into the one utf-8 codepoint for the Chinese character?
Or how can I properly encode it?
This is code fragment dealing with the cstring returned from sphinx and its encoding to a NSString:
const char * hypothesis = ps_get_hyp(pocketSphinxDecoder, &recognitionScore, &utteranceID);
NSString *hypothesisString = [[NSString alloc] initWithCString:hypothesis encoding:NSMacOSRomanEncoding];
Edit: From looking at the addition to your post, you actually do have control over the string encoding. In that case, why are you creating the string with NSMacOSRomanEncoding when you're expecting utf-8? Just change that to NSUTF8StringEncoding.
It sounds like what you're saying is you're being given an NSString that contains UTF-8 data that's being interpreted as a single-byte encoding (e.g. ISO-Latin-1, MacRoman, etc). I'm assuming here that you have no control over the code that creates the NSString, because if you did then the solution is just to change the encoding it's initializing with.
In any case, what you're asking for is a way to take the data in the string and convert it back to UTF-8. You can do this by creating an NSData from the NSString using whatever encoding its was originally created with (you need to know this much, at least, or it won't work), and then you can create a new NSString from the same data using UTF-8.
From the example character you gave (人) it looks like it's being interpreted as MacRoman, so lets go with that. The following code should convert it back:
- (NSString *)fixEncodingOfString:(NSString *)input {
CFStringEncoding cfEncoding = kCFStringEncodingMacRoman;
NSStringEncoding encoding = CFStringCovnertEncodingToNSStringEncoding(cfEncoding);
NSData *data = [input dataUsingEncoding:encoding];
if (!data) {
// the string wasn't actually in MacRoman
return nil;
}
NSString *output = [[[NSString alloc] initWithData:data encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] autorelease];
}
I have a Mac application that keeps it's own log file. It appends info to the file using NSString's writeToFile method. One of the things that it logs are URL's of web services that it is interacting with. To encode the URL, I'm doing this:
searchString = (NSString *)CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(NULL, (CFStringRef)searchString, NULL, (CFStringRef)#"!*'();:#&=+$,/?%#[]", kCFStringEncodingUTF8 );
The app then appends searchString to the rest of the URL and writes it to the log file. Now the problem is that after adding that URL encoding line, nothing seems to be getting written to the file. The program functions as expected otherwise however. Removing the line of code above results in all of the correct information being logged to the file (removing that line is not an option because searchString must be URL encoded).
Oh and I am using NSUTF8StringEncoding when writing the NSString to the file.
Thanks for any help.
EDIT: I know there's also a similar function to CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes in NSString, but I've read that it doesn't always work. Can anyone shed some light on this if my original question cannot be answered? Thanks! (EDIT: same problem occurs when using stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:)
EDIT 2: Here's the code that I'm using to append messages to the log file.
+(void)logText:(NSString *)theString{
NSString *docsDirectory = [NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSApplicationSupportDirectory,NSUserDomainMask,YES) objectAtIndex:0];
NSString *path = [docsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:#"Folder/File.log"];
NSString *fileContents = [[[NSString alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:path] autorelease];
if([fileContents lengthOfBytesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] >= 204800){
fileContents = #"";
}
NSString *timeStamp = [[NSDate date] description];
timeStamp = [timeStamp stringByAppendingString:#": "];
timeStamp = [timeStamp stringByAppendingString:theString];
fileContents = [fileContents stringByAppendingString:timeStamp];
fileContents = [fileContents stringByAppendingString:#"\n"];
[fileContents writeToFile:path atomically:YES encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:NULL];
}
Because after almost a whole day no one else has offered any answers, I'm going to post a wild guess here: you're not accidentally using the string you want to output (with percent characters in it) as a format string are you?
That is, making the mistake of doing:
NSLog(#"In format strings you can use %# as a placeholder for an object, and %i for a plain C integer.")
Instead of:
NSLog(#"%#", #"In format strings you can use %# as a placeholder for an object, and %i for a plain C integer.");
But I'm going to be surprised if this turns out to be the cause of your problem, as it usually causes random-looking output, rather than absolutely no output. And in some cases, Xcode also gives compiler warnings about it (when I tried NSLog(myString), I got "warning: format not a string literal and no format arguments").
So don't shoot me down if this answer doesn't help. It would be easier to answer your question if you could show us more of your logging code. As for the one line you provided, I can't detect anything wrong with it.
Edit: Oops, I kind of missed that you mentioned you're using writeToFile:atomically:encoding:error: to write the string to the file, so it's even more unlikely you're accidentally treating it as a format string somewhere. But I'm going to leave this answer up for now. Again, you should really show us more of your code though ...
Edit: Regarding your question on a method in NSString that has similar percent encoding functionality, that would be stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:. I'm not sure what kind of problems you're thinking of when you say you've heard it doesn't always work. But one thing is that CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes allows you to specify extra characters that don't normally have to be escaped but which you still want to be escaped, while the method of NSString doesn't allow you to specify this.
Is there some blindingly obvious reason why this is producing a nil string instead of the actual text content of the file?
NSString *fromFile = [NSString stringWithContentsOfFile:
#"file://localhost/Users/username/Desktop/test.txt"];
NSLog(#"%#", fromFile);
PRINTS: "(null)"
The file is a plain ASCII text file saved from TextWrangler with contents ' abc '.
The path comes from dragging the actual file from the desktop into the Xcode editor window.
I've also tried without "file://localhost".
The method documentation says "Returns nil if the file can't be opened". There's nothing unusual about the file (not locked, etc.). It has default Unix permissions and was created by the same user as is running Xcode.
I know this method is deprecated -- trying to get this working first.
You have stringWithContentsOfFile: and stringWithContentsOfURL: mixed up.
If you are passing in a URL e.g.
#"file://localhost/Users/username/Desktop/test.txt"
the you want stringWithContentsOfURL: and make the parameter a NSURL e.g.
[NSURL URLWithString:#"file://localhost/Users/username/Desktop/test.txt"]
If you want to use stringWithContentsOfFile: the the parameter should be
#"/Users/username/Desktop/test.txt"
Have you tried ~/Desktop/test.txt or /Users/username/Desktop/test.txt?