NSURL and URL Validity

I'm using a URL from an API where a search term is surrounded by quotation marks. For example: http://www.example.com/searchterm="search".

However, because of the quotation marks, my NSURL (generated by URLWithString) is nil due to an invalid URL. Is there a way around this? Thanks!

You can place a backslash before the quotation mark, or the URL encoded value %22:

http://www.example.com/searchterm=\"search\"

http://www.example.com/searchterm=%22search%22

or you can remove the quotations before using it as an NSURL.

NSString * searchUrl = @"http://www.example.com/searchterm=\"search\"";
searchUrl = 
  [searchUrl stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"\"" withString:@""]; // something to this effect, not tested.

Then you can go about your normal NSURL call:

[NSURL URLWithString: searchUrl];

Try the following:

#define SAFARI_SEARCH_URL_FORMAT @"http://search/search?q=\"%@\""
mySearchBar.text =@"hello";
NSString * tempstr = [NSString stringWithFormat:SAFARI_SEARCH_URL_FORMAT, mySearchBar.text];

    NSURL *an1Url = [[[NSURL alloc] initWithString:[tempstr stringByReplacingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]
] autorelease];
NSLog(@"--(%@)--",an1Url);

an1Url will not be nil