iOS how to remove & from NSString

[Narendar Singh]

I have a text coming from the server in following way:
AT&T

How to remove & from the this string.

Additionally I dont want to replace on & with &

I am looking for a solution in which all the &xxx; will be changed in correct character.

I have tried stringByReplacingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding but it was not working.

 

[dejo]

Additionally I dont want to replace on & with &

What do you want it replaced with? Nothing?

I am looking for a solution in which all the &xxx; will be changed in correct character.

I'm confused. What do you mean by "correct character"? And do you want that for & as well, or is it a special case?

 

[Narendar Singh]

What do you want it replaced with? Nothing?


I'm confused. What do you mean by "correct character"? And do you want that for & as well, or is it a special case?

Some of the examples:

" should change with "
& should change with &
'
< should change with <
>

 

[dejo]

I don't think there's anything built-in to easily do this, so I've been using Google's GTMNSString+HTML category. I haven't been able to find a link to it at the "Google Toolbox for Mac" site so I extracted it from this github project: MWFeedParser

 

[robbieduncan]

I have a text coming from the server in following way:
AT&T

How to remove & from the this string.

Additionally I dont want to replace on & with &

I am looking for a solution in which all the &xxx; will be changed in correct character.

I have tried stringByReplacingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding but it was not working.

Some of the examples:

" should change with "
& should change with &
&apos;
< should change with <
>

It might be possible to do this using a UIWebView. I can't see that being a high performance solution though (create off-screen web view, insert string, let it render, read text back)

 

[Guiyon]

I ran into a similar problem on the project I am working on. I ended up implementing a category which can take care of the conversion for me using libxml2. First, I run through the string and convert any named entities into their hex equivalent, then I run the converted string through libxml2 to convert the hex entities into the unicode character. You can take a look at the code on GitHub. Find the NSString category named MITAdditions_HTMLEntity; - (NSString *)stringByDecodingXMLEntities is the method that performs the conversion. A word to the wise, though, the method is rarely used so it was a brute force approach and hasn't been optimized (or really cleaned up at all...).

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

I shared the code I've personally used in this tutorial (wrote it for an English class... I found the more technical I got, the less likely my teacher would actually follow and I had a better chance of just getting an automatic A.)

https://sites.google.com/site/unit2iostutorial/controller#escapeChars

 

[blueillusion]

take a look at the NSRegularExpression class, specifically the methods:

replaceMatchesInString:options:range:withTemplate:
stringByReplacingMatchesInString:options:range:withTemplate:

I've used this to go the other way around. ie < becomes <
You could easily use the functions to do the reverse.