Introduced in iOS8 and OS X 10.10 is NSURLQueryItem
, which can be used to build queries. From the docs on NSURLQueryItem:
An NSURLQueryItem object represents a single name/value pair for an item in the query portion of a URL. You use query items with the queryItems property of an NSURLComponents object.
To create one use the designated initializer queryItemWithName:value:
and then add them to NSURLComponents
to generate an NSURL
. For example:
NSURLComponents *components = [NSURLComponents componentsWithString:@"http://stackoverflow.com"];
NSURLQueryItem *search = [NSURLQueryItem queryItemWithName:@"q" value:@"ios"];
NSURLQueryItem *count = [NSURLQueryItem queryItemWithName:@"count" value:@"10"];
components.queryItems = @[ search, count ];
NSURL *url = components.URL; // http://stackoverflow.com?q=ios&count=10
Notice that the question mark and ampersand are automatically handled. Creating an NSURL
from a dictionary of parameters is as simple as:
NSDictionary *queryDictionary = @{ @"q": @"ios", @"count": @"10" };
NSMutableArray *queryItems = [NSMutableArray array];
for (NSString *key in queryDictionary) {
[queryItems addObject:[NSURLQueryItem queryItemWithName:key value:queryDictionary[key]]];
}
components.queryItems = queryItems;
I’ve also written a blog post on how to build URLs with NSURLComponents
and NSURLQueryItems
.