Creating URL query parameters from NSDictionary objects in ObjectiveC

With all the URL-handling objects lying around in the standard Cocoa libraries (NSURL, NSMutableURL, NSMutableURLRequest, etc), I know I must be overlooking an easy way to programmatically compose a GET request.

Currently I'm manually appending "?" followed by name value pairs joined by "&", but all of my name and value pairs need to be manually encoded so NSMutableURLRequest doesn't fail entirely when it tries to connect to the URL.

This feels like something I should be able to use a pre-baked API for.... is there anything out of the box to append an NSDictionary of query parameters to an NSURL? Is there another way I should approach this?

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.

You can create a category for NSDictionary to do this -- there isn't a standard way in the Cocoa library that I could find either. The code that I use looks like this:

// file "NSDictionary+UrlEncoding.h"
#import <cocoa/cocoa.h>

@interface NSDictionary (UrlEncoding)

-(NSString*) urlEncodedString;

@end

with this implementation:

// file "NSDictionary+UrlEncoding.m"
#import "NSDictionary+UrlEncoding.h"

// helper function: get the string form of any object
static NSString *toString(id object) {
  return [NSString stringWithFormat: @"%@", object];
}

// helper function: get the url encoded string form of any object
static NSString *urlEncode(id object) {
  NSString *string = toString(object);
  return [string stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding];
}

@implementation NSDictionary (UrlEncoding)

-(NSString*) urlEncodedString {
  NSMutableArray *parts = [NSMutableArray array];
  for (id key in self) {
    id value = [self objectForKey: key];
    NSString *part = [NSString stringWithFormat: @"%@=%@", urlEncode(key), urlEncode(value)];
    [parts addObject: part];
  }
  return [parts componentsJoinedByString: @"&"];
}

@end

I think the code's pretty straightforward, but I discuss it in some more detail at http://blog.ablepear.com/2008/12/urlencoding-category-for-nsdictionary.html.

I wanted to use Chris's answer, but it wasn't written for Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) so I updated it. I thought I'd paste my solution in case anyone else has this same issue. Note: replace self with the instance or class name where appropriate.

+(NSString*)urlEscapeString:(NSString *)unencodedString 
{
    CFStringRef originalStringRef = (__bridge_retained CFStringRef)unencodedString;
    NSString *s = (__bridge_transfer NSString *)CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(NULL,originalStringRef, NULL, (CFStringRef)@"!*'\"();:@&=+$,/?%#[]% ", kCFStringEncodingUTF8);
    CFRelease(originalStringRef);
    return s;
}


+(NSString*)addQueryStringToUrlString:(NSString *)urlString withDictionary:(NSDictionary *)dictionary
{
    NSMutableString *urlWithQuerystring = [[NSMutableString alloc] initWithString:urlString];

    for (id key in dictionary) {
        NSString *keyString = [key description];
        NSString *valueString = [[dictionary objectForKey:key] description];

        if ([urlWithQuerystring rangeOfString:@"?"].location == NSNotFound) {
            [urlWithQuerystring appendFormat:@"?%@=%@", [self urlEscapeString:keyString], [self urlEscapeString:valueString]];
        } else {
            [urlWithQuerystring appendFormat:@"&%@=%@", [self urlEscapeString:keyString], [self urlEscapeString:valueString]];
        }
    }
    return urlWithQuerystring;
}

The other answers work great if the values are strings, however if the values are dictionaries or arrays then this code will handle that.

Its important to note that there is no standard way of passing an array/dictionary via the query string but PHP handles this output just fine

-(NSString *)serializeParams:(NSDictionary *)params {
    /*

     Convert an NSDictionary to a query string

     */

    NSMutableArray* pairs = [NSMutableArray array];
    for (NSString* key in [params keyEnumerator]) {
        id value = [params objectForKey:key];
        if ([value isKindOfClass:[NSDictionary class]]) {
            for (NSString *subKey in value) {
                NSString* escaped_value = (NSString *)CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(NULL,
                                                                                              (CFStringRef)[value objectForKey:subKey],
                                                                                              NULL,
                                                                                              (CFStringRef)@"!*'();:@&=+$,/?%#[]",
                                                                                              kCFStringEncodingUTF8);
                [pairs addObject:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@[%@]=%@", key, subKey, escaped_value]];
            }
        } else if ([value isKindOfClass:[NSArray class]]) {
            for (NSString *subValue in value) {
                NSString* escaped_value = (NSString *)CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(NULL,
                                                                                              (CFStringRef)subValue,
                                                                                              NULL,
                                                                                              (CFStringRef)@"!*'();:@&=+$,/?%#[]",
                                                                                              kCFStringEncodingUTF8);
                [pairs addObject:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@[]=%@", key, escaped_value]];
            }
        } else {
            NSString* escaped_value = (NSString *)CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(NULL,
                                                                                          (CFStringRef)[params objectForKey:key],
                                                                                          NULL,
                                                                                          (CFStringRef)@"!*'();:@&=+$,/?%#[]",
                                                                                          kCFStringEncodingUTF8);
            [pairs addObject:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@=%@", key, escaped_value]];
            [escaped_value release];
        }
    }
    return [pairs componentsJoinedByString:@"&"];
}

Examples

[foo] => bar
[translations] => 
        {
            [one] => uno
            [two] => dos
            [three] => tres
        }

foo=bar&translations[one]=uno&translations[two]=dos&translations[three]=tres

[foo] => bar
[translations] => 
        {
            uno
            dos
            tres
        }

foo=bar&translations[]=uno&translations[]=dos&translations[]=tres