I am trying to parse some data using nsxmlparser, whenever there is a &(ampersand) present in the text being received it just stops reading the parsed data. How can I read & normally, similar to other normal characters.
Thanks
Pankaj
A lone ampersand in an XML document is not valid except in a CDATA section. You can either have your XML provider provide valid XML by either:
Using the & character entity where you want ampersands.
Putting text containing ampersands into a CDATA section.
Could not find the solution so i had to replace the & with some characters in backend and then again replace it in iphone while using it
Related
I have some xml that is coming back from a web service. I in turn use xslt to turn that xml into json (I am turning someone else's xml service into a json-based service). My service, which is now outputting JSON, is consumed by my iphone app using the de facto iphone json framework, SBJSON.
The problem is, using the [string JSONValue] method chokes, and I can see that it's due to line breaks. Lo and behold, even the FAQ tells me the problem but I don't know how to fix it.
The parser fails to parse string X
Are you sure it's legal JSON? This framework is really strict, so won't accept stuff that (apparently) several validators accepts. In particular, literal TAB, NEWLINE or CARRIAGE RETURN (and all other control characters) characters in string tokens are disallowed, but can be very difficult to spot. (These characters are allowed between tokens, of course.)
If you get something like the below (the number may vary) then one of your strings has disallowed Unicode control characters in it.
NSLocalizedDescription = "Unescaped control character '0x9'";
I have tried using a line such as: NSString *myString = [myString stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:#"\n" withString:#"\\n"];
But that doesn't work. My xml service is not coming back as CDATA. The xml does have a line break in it as far as I can tell (how would I confirm this). I just want to faithfully transmit the line break into JSON.
I have actually spent an entire day on this, so it's time to ask. I have no pride anymore.
Thanks alot
Escaping a new line character should work. So following line should ideally work. Just check if your input also contains '\r' character.
NSString *myString = [myString stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:#"\n" withString:#"\\n"];
You can check which control character is present in the string using any editor which supports displaying all characters (non-displayable characters as well). e.g. using Notepad++ you can view all characters contained in a string.
It sounds like your XSLT is not working, in that it is not producing legal JSON. This is unsurprising, as producing correctly formatted JSON strings is not entirely trivial. I'm wondering if it would be simpler to just use the standard XML library to parse the XML into data structures that your app can consume.
I don't have a solution for you, but I usually use CJSONSerializer and CJSONDeserializer from the TouchJSON project and it is pretty reliable, I have never had a problem with line breaks before. Just a thought.
http://code.google.com/p/touchcode/source/browse/TouchJSON/Source/JSON/CJSONDeserializer.m?r=6294fcb084a8f174e243a68ccfb7e2c519def219
http://code.google.com/p/touchcode/source/browse/TouchJSON/Source/JSON/CJSONSerializer.m?r=3f52118ae2ff60cc34e31dd36d92610c9dd6c306
I am trying to display “Administrative File & Express” but it is displaying as "Express". So I am unable to show anything that is before the “&”.
You need to escape chars like '&' in XML Parsing. See following link...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references
What characters do I need to escape in XML documents?
Now check XML you are receiving. if you are not receiving chars with escape sequence then you need to handle it in your code.....
Write here if you need further details.....
I'm having a .plist file which has some values with the "&" sign, for example "M&I". When I save the file to the document folder and load it from there, I'm getting an empty dictionary. Any idea to how to fix this issue?
If you are directly modifying the XML file, you have to escape certain characters - & should be escaped using the XML entity &. If you use the editors, this should be done automatically for you.
If you use CDATA sections instead, you don't have to escape the characters.
If you insert the values when open plist file as property list it would do it automatically.
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:
view
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!
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 &.
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.
I have a function within a custom CRM web application (old VB.Net circa 2003) that takes a set of fields from a database and merges them with palceholders in a set of RTF based template documents. These generate merged letters and documentation. The code essentially loops through each line of the RTF template file and replaces any instances of the placeholder values with text from a database record. The issue I'm having is that users have pasted a certain type of apostrophe into the web app (and therefore into the database) that is not rendering correctly in the resulting RTF file. It is rendering like this - ’.
I need a way to spot this invalid apostrophe in the code and replace it with a valid one. Unfortunately when I paste the invalid apostrophe into the Visual Studio editor it gets converted into the correct one. So I need another way to express this invalid apostrophe's value. Unfortunately I do not know a great deal about unicode and other encodings so I'm calling out for help with this.
Any ideas?
If you really just want to figure out what the character is you might want to try and paste it into a text editor like ultraedit. It has a hex mode that you can flip to to see the actual underlying bytes.
In order to do the replace once you've figured out the character you'd do something like this in Vb,
text.Replace(ChrW(2001), "'")
Note that you might not be able to figure it out easily using the text editor because it might also get mangled by paste from the clipboard. You might want to either print some debug of the ascii values from code. You can use the AscW function to do that.
I can't help but think that it may actually simply be a case of specifying the correct encoding to use when you write out the stream though. Assuming you're using a StreamWriter you can specify it on the constructor. I'm guessing you actually want ASCII given your requirement.
oWriter = New System.IO.StreamWriter(path, False, System.Text.Encoding.ASCII)
It looks like you probably want to encode characters out of the 8 bit range (>255).
You can do that using \uNNNN according to the wikipedia article.