I'm trying to get an image from an URL and it doesn't seem to be working for me. Can someone point me in the right direction?
Here is my code:
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://myurl/mypic.jpg"];
NSString *newIMAGE = [[NSString alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:url
encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:nil];
cell.image = [UIImage imageNamed:newIMAGE];
When I debug the newIMAGE string is nil so something isn't working there.
What you want is to get the image data, then initialize a UIImage using that data:
NSData * imageData = [[NSData alloc] initWithContentsOfURL: [NSURL URLWithString: @"http://myurl/mypic.jpg"]];
cell.image = [UIImage imageWithData: imageData];
[imageData release];
As requested, here's an asynchronous version:
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue(0,0), ^{
NSData * data = [[NSData alloc] initWithContentsOfURL: [NSURL URLWithString: @"http://myurl/mypic.jpg"]];
if ( data == nil )
return;
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
// WARNING: is the cell still using the same data by this point??
cell.image = [UIImage imageWithData: data];
});
[data release];
});
Ok there's a couple of things wrong here:
The conversion from URL (url) to NSString (newImage) is incorrect, what the code actually does there is try to load the contents of "http://myurl/mypic.jpg" into the NSString.
The -imageNamed method takes a string that is a path of a local file, not a URL as an argument.
You need to use an NSData object as an intermediary, like in this example: http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2008/02/creating-an-uiimage-from-a-url.html
Updating upon Jim dovey answer,[data release] is no longer required because in the updated apple guidelines. Memory management is done automatically by ARC (Automatic counting reference) ,
Here is the updated asynchronous call,
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue(0,0), ^{
NSData * data = [[NSData alloc] initWithContentsOfURL: [NSURL URLWithString: @"your_URL"]];
if ( data == nil )
return;
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
self.your_UIimage.image = [UIImage imageWithData: data];
});
});