converting NSString to JSON string

October 29, 2009
Tags: , , ,

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):

jsonstring

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];
}

Filed under:
apple, iphone by lajos

One Response to “converting NSString to JSON string”

  1. Robin Kansara
    August 23rd, 2010 at 5:56 am

    Thanks a ton man, :)!!
    Helped me to post to facebook with a proper JSON string, :)

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