I needed a quick way to encode an NSString to be used in a JSON object in an iPhone project. There are libraries to do this like TouchJSON, but I didn’t want to link a whole library to insert a string into a Facebook query.
A JSON string looks like this (image from json.org):
NSString is already UTF-8, but characters like \n have to be escaped. Here’s the method I came up with:
-(NSString *)JSONString:(NSString *)aString {
NSMutableString *s = [NSMutableString stringWithString:aString];
[s replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"\"" withString:@"\\\"" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [s length])];
[s replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"/" withString:@"\\/" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [s length])];
[s replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"\n" withString:@"\\n" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [s length])];
[s replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"\b" withString:@"\\b" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [s length])];
[s replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"\f" withString:@"\\f" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [s length])];
[s replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"\r" withString:@"\\r" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [s length])];
[s replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"\t" withString:@"\\t" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [s length])];
return [NSString stringWithString:s];
}
A JSON string looks like this (image from json.org):
NSString is already UTF-8, but characters like \n have to be escaped. Here’s the method I came up with:
-(NSString *)JSONString:(NSString *)aString {
NSMutableString *s = [NSMutableString stringWithString:aString];
[s replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"\"" withString:@"\\\"" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [s length])];
[s replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"/" withString:@"\\/" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [s length])];
[s replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"\n" withString:@"\\n" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [s length])];
[s replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"\b" withString:@"\\b" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [s length])];
[s replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"\f" withString:@"\\f" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [s length])];
[s replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"\r" withString:@"\\r" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [s length])];
[s replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"\t" withString:@"\\t" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [s length])];
return [NSString stringWithString:s];
}