Unicode to UTF8 in Swift

Question

I am using the Maps API and when searching for some addresses in foreign countries, the address comes back with Unicode characters embedded like this:

"Place du Panth\U00e9on",
"75005 Paris"

The unicode character in this instance is \U00e9 which is é

The trouble I have having is that SwiftyJSON pukes if I have saved this data in a JSON file and try to read it back. SwiftyJSON does not like the back slash character '\' The JSON is valid and even if I could read it, it is still not good as I would rather have é displayed properly as well as all other Unicode characters.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to convert all unicode characters to UTF8 encoding of that character in Swift?

Should I just write a function that searches for all of the Unicode characters and then convert them?

Answer 1

Unless someone has a better idea, I just wrote this function that is doing the trick for me now.

func convertFromUnicode(var myString:String) -> String {
    let convertDict:[String:String] = ["\\U00c0":"À", "\\U00c1" :"Á","\\U00c2":"Â","\\U00c3":"Ã","\\U00c4":"Ä","\\U00c5":"Å","\\U00c6":"Æ","\\U00c7":"Ç","\\U00c8":"È","\\U00c9":"É","\\U00ca":"Ê","\\U00cb":"Ë","\\U00cc":"Ì","\\U00cd":"Í","\\U00ce":"Î","\\U00cf":"Ï","\\U00d1":"Ñ","\\U00d2":"Ò","\\U00d3":"Ó","\\U00d4":"Ô","\\U00d5":"Õ","\\U00d6":"Ö","\\U00d8":"Ø","\\U00d9":"Ù","\\U00da":"Ú","\\U00db":"Û","\\U00dc":"Ü","\\U00dd":"Ý","\\U00df":"ß","\\U00e0":"à","\\U00e1":"á","\\U00e2":"â","\\U00e3":"ã","\\U00e4":"ä","\\U00e5":"å","\\U00e6":"æ","\\U00e7":"ç","\\U00e8":"è","\\U00e9":"é","\\U00ea":"ê","\\U00eb":"ë","\\U00ec":"ì","\\U00ed":"í","\\U00ee":"î","\\U00ef":"ï","\\U00f0":"ð","\\U00f1":"ñ","\\U00f2":"ò","\\U00f3":"ó","\\U00f4":"ô","\\U00f5":"õ","\\U00f6":"ö","\\U00f8":"ø","\\U00f9":"ù","\\U00fa":"ú","\\U00fb":"û","\\U00fc":"ü","\\U00fd":"ý","\\U00ff":"ÿ"]

    for (key,value) in convertDict {
        myString = myString.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString(key, withString: value)

    }
 return myString
}