Format NSString (Char-Replacement, UTF, ...) - iphone

Question

Google Maps API delivers me a string which contains the German letters: ö, ä , ü and probably several other special characters.
The string looks like:
#" (several spaces ...) Frankfurt an der Oder (several spaces ...) "
(1) If I try stringByReplacing ... and make the spaces disappear, it looks like:
#"FrankfurtanderOder" ... which is even worse. So I need to delete the spaces before the first and after the last word, not the spaces in between. How to do this?
(2) Sometimes Google delivers me #"W\U00fcrzburg, Deutschland"
... there is nothing said in the JSON-request about encodings ... could it be that the JSON-parser and not the api is the problem?
However, still I have to solve it. Any ideas?
Thank you so far!
EDIT:
For (2) I'll do the workaround and replace some UTF-8 characters ... (Even If this is definitely not the best solution ...)
ä -> ä
ö -> ö
ü -> ü
Ä -> Ä
Ö -> Ö
Ü -> Ü
ß -> ß
" -> "
\u00C4 -> Ä
\u00E4 -> ä
\u00D6 -> Ö
\u00F6 -> ö
\u00DC -> Ü
\u00FC -> ü
\u00DF -> ß

Answer 1

– stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:
NSString *str = #" Frankfurt an der Oder ";
NSString *trimmed = [str stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]];
NSLog(#"\"%#\"", str);
NSLog(#"\"%#\"", trimmed);
2012-03-26 14:10:49.302 xx[3752:f803] " Frankfurt an der Oder "
2012-03-26 14:10:49.333 xx[3752:f803] "Frankfurt an der Oder"
about the ü. Does the \U00fc appear in an UILabel or did you just got them from a NSLog? In my experience sometimes NSLog doesn't print the decoded letters but they appear okay in interface elements.

Answer 2

You need a few steps here:
NSString *unescapeBackslashes(NSString *input)
{
// find occurences of '\'
int index = 0;
NSRange range = NSMakeRange(0, input.length);
NSMutableString *output = [NSMutableString string];
while ((range = [input rangeOfString:#"\\u" options:0 range:NSMakeRange(index, input.length - index)]).location != NSNotFound) {
assert(input.length > range.location + 5);
char temp[5];
strncpy(temp, [input cStringUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding] + range.location + 2, 4);
[output appendString:[input substringWithRange:NSMakeRange(index, range.location - index)]];
// append the unicode char
[output appendFormat:#"%C", strtol(temp, NULL, 16)];
index = range.location + 6;
}
[output appendString:[input substringWithRange:NSMakeRange(index, input.length - index)]];
return output;
}
int main(int argc, const char *argv[])
{
#autoreleasepool {
NSString *input = #" W\\u00fcrzburg, Deutschland ";
NSLog(#"Input: %#", input);
NSString *trimmed = [input stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceCharacterSet]];
NSString *escaped = unescapeBackslashes(trimmed);
NSLog(#"Trimmed: %#", trimmed);
NSLog(#"Escaped: %#", escaped);
}
}