URL-encoding strings in Swift
In this post, we’ll look at how to url encode strings. We’ll then create an extension that let’s us do this easier and with less code.
The basics
As far as I know, Swift has no great native way to url encode strings. We can come a bit on our way by using addingPercentEncoding:
let string = "Hello, world & beyond!"
string.addingPercentEncoding(withAllowedCharacters: .urlPathAllowed)
// => "Hello,%20world%20&%20beyond!"
However, this will not perform a complete encoding. If a string contains & for instance, it remains unchanged and mess up things if the string should be used as query parameters.
To solve this, we need to replace all & with their url encoded form, %26:
string.addingPercentEncoding(withAllowedCharacters: .urlPathAllowed)
.replacingOccurrences(of: "&", with: "%26")
// => "Hello,%20world%20%26%20beyond!"
This is better, but I think you see where I am going with this. We can’t do this every time we want to url encode a string. We can do better.
Extending String
Let’s create a String extension to help us perform url encoding better:
public extension String {
func urlEncoded() -> String? {
addingPercentEncoding(withAllowedCharacters: .urlPathAllowed)?
.replacingOccurrences(of: "&", with: "%26")
}
}
We can now perform url encoding in a much more compact and readable way:
string.urlEncoded()
// => "Hello,%20world%20%26%20beyond!"
I think this is a lot cleaner. It’s also less error-prone, since we don’t repeat the same logic over and over in our codebase.
Also, if we need to handle another character, we just have to change this single extension.
Source Code
I have added this extension to my SwiftUIKit library. You can find the source code here. Feel free to try it out and let me know what you think!