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I am using libical which is a library to parse the icalendar format (RFC 2445).
The problem is, that there may be some german umlaute for example in the location field.
Now libical returns a const char * for each value like: 

"K\303\203\302\274nstlerhaus in M\303\203\302\274nchen"

I tried to convert it to NSString with: 

[NSString stringWithCString:icalvalue_as_ical_string_r(value) encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

But what I get is:

Künstlerhaus in München

Any suggestions? I would appreciate any help!

casperOne
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Alexander
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2 Answers2

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Seems like your string got doubly-UTF-8-encoded, because "Künstlerhaus in München" actually is UTF-8, if you UTF-8-decode that again you should get the correct string.

Bear in mind though that you shouldn't be satisfied with that result. There are combinations where a doubly-UTF-8-encoded string can't be simply be decoded by doing a double-UTF-8-decode. Some encoding combinations are irreversible. So in your situation I'd suggest you find out why the string got doubly-UTF-8-encoded in the first place, probably the ical is stored in the wrong encoding on the hard disk, or libical uses the wrong character set to access it, or if you're getting the ical from a server, perhaps the charset there is wrong for text/ical, etc, etc...

Thomas Wana
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  • "Künstlerhaus in München" decodes to "Künstlerhaus in München" in utf-8. – vakio Feb 10 '12 at 11:12
  • Ah okay thanks, could u give me an example how to decode a NSString again? – Alexander Feb 10 '12 at 11:33
  • `NSString *string1 = [NSString stringWithCString:"K\303\203\302\274nstlerhaus in M\303\203\302\274nchen" encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];` `NSString *string2 = [NSString stringWithCString:[string1 cStringUsingEncoding:NSISOLatin1StringEncoding] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];` But as I said before, you really shouldn't do that, it's pretty ugly. – Thomas Wana Feb 10 '12 at 11:48
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The C string does not seem to be encoded in UTF-8, as there are four bytes for each of the characters. For example ü would be encoded as \xc3\xbc (or \195\188) in UTF-8. So the input is either already garbled when you receive it or it uses some other encoding.

zoul
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