title: NSString with emoticons/emojis url encode
body: <p>I am trying to take the contents of a UITextField that may contain special characters and emojis and turn it into something I can pass in a GET request to a PHP service.</p>
  
  <p>If I do not encode the string at all, the emojis show up just fine (I can see them in the DB and they come back to me properly)... but if I add special chars (~!@#$%, etc.) the GET request chokes.</p>
  
  <p>So I run the string through the url encoder:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[commentText stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSNonLossyASCIIStringEncoding];
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am using the NSNonLossyASCIIStringEncoding to get the emojis out properly, which works, but using this to encode returns a nil string.  In fact, the only encoding that does not return a nil is UTF8, but that munges up the emoji unicode with percent-escapes.</p>
  
  <p>How do I do this?  Do I have to write my own string replacement for this case, or is there an iOS way to do it that I am not seeing?</p>
  
  <p>Cheers,</p>
  
  <p>Chris</p>