initWithContentsOfURL behavior

Question

In my code, I load a URL (an aspx file) in a UIWebview. It loads and displays fine.

[webView loadRequest:requestObject];

I want to inspect the HTML content being loaded on the iPhone. When I display it in UIWebview using the following code, the UIWebview display format is broken, showing lines and tables in word-wrap format.

NSString *htmlContent = [[NSString alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:inputUrl encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding  error:&error];

[webView loadHTMLString:htmlContent baseURL:nil];

What could cause the difference, when a file is opened using loadRequest versus loadHTMLString as above?

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 27 '12 at 03:08

1

The call to loadHTMLString does not know what URL to use to resolve any relative URLs that are contained within the HTML. This should be passed in baseURL.

answered Sep 27 '12 at 03:08

combinatorial

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Thanks for the reply. I tried specifying the baseURL, but that did not make any difference. I wonder if the problem has something to do with this being an ASPX file (which is processed by the ASP web server, and it returns HTML to the client). – kzia Sep 27 '12 at 03:24
I have also noticed that the break in formatting is very similar to when I did not have the correct "UserAgent" specified for iPhone safari browser. As if, the web server is not processing the htmlContent for the correct web browser. – kzia Sep 27 '12 at 03:35
1

You could try setting a useragent using NSMutableURLRequest, there is an example here... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1532206/changing-the-useragent-of-nsurlconnection – combinatorial Sep 27 '12 at 04:38
Thank you combinatorial. Setting the User-Agent first in the request, and then sending the request via NSURLConnection worked. I converted the NSData returned into NSString and displayed it in WebView using loadHTMLString. – kzia Sep 27 '12 at 19:50

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 27 '12 at 19:54

Here is the code for anyone who may be interested:

    NSString* userAgent = @"Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3"; // user agent for iPhone browser
    NSMutableURLRequest* request = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:inputUrl]; // ARC enabled
    [request setValue:userAgent forHTTPHeaderField:@"User-Agent"]; //setting user agent
    NSURLResponse* response = nil;
    NSError* error = nil;
    NSData* data = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request returningResponse:&response error:&error];
    NSString *str = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:data encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; // ARC enabled
    NSURL *base = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://mainwebsitehere"];
    [webView loadHTMLString:str baseURL:base];

initWithContentsOfURL behavior

2 Answers2