Encoding issue: Cocoa Error 261?

Question

So I'm fetching a JSON string from a php script in my iPhone app using:

NSURL *baseURL = [NSURL URLWithString:@"test.php"];
NSError *encodeError = [[NSError alloc] init];
NSString *jsonString = [NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:baseURL encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:&encodeError];
NSLog(@"Error: %@", [encodeError localizedDescription]);
NSLog(@"STRING: %@", jsonString);

The JSON string validates when I test the output. Now I'm having an encoding issue. When I fetch a single echo'd line such as:

{ "testKey":"é" }

The JSON parser works fine and I am able to create a valid JSON object. However, when I fetch my 2MB JSON string, I get presented with:

Error: Operation could not be completed. (Cocoa error 261.)

and a Null string. My PHP file is UTF8 itself and I am not using utf8_encode() because that seems to double encode the data since I'm already pulling the data as NSUTF8StringEncoding. Either way, in my single-echo test, it's the approach that allowed me to successfully log \ASDAS style UTF8 escapes when building the JSON object.

What could be causing the error in the case of the larger string?

Also, I'm not sure if it makes a difference, but I'm using the php function addslashes() on my parsed php data to account for quotes and such when building the JSON string.

Answer 1

I'm surprised no one has mentioned using a different encoding value instead of NSUTF8StringEncoding when calling [NSString stringWithContentsOfFile:encoding:error:].

I also got Cocoa error 261 when parsing a JSON file. I just went through the list of NSString encodings until one worked. Fortunately the first one worked for me: NSASCIIStringEncoding!

You can also use NSString stringWithContentsOfFile:usedEncoding:error: to try to find the correct encoding (as described here: How to use stringWithContentsOfURL:encoding:error:?).