GKSession sendDataToAllPeers getting invalid parameter
- by cb4
This is my first post and I wanted to start it by thanking the many stackoverflow contributors who will never know how much they helped me out these past several days as I worked to complete my first iOS app. I am indebted to them and to this site for giving them a place to post. To 'pay off' some of that debt, I hope this will help others as I have been helped...
So, my app uses the GKPeerPickerController to make a connection to a 2nd device. Once connected, the devices can send text messages to each other. The receiving peer has the message displayed in a UIAlertView. Everything was working fine.
Then I decided to experiment with locations and added code to get the current location. I convert it into latitude & longitude in degrees, minutes, and seconds and put them into one NSString. I added a button to my storyboard called 'Send Location' which, when tapped, sends the location to the connected peer. This is where I ran into the problem.
Both the send text and send location methods call the sendPacket method with a NSString. sendPacket converts the string to NSData and calls sendDataToAllPeers. When I learned how to capture the error, it was "Invalid parameter for - sendDataToAllPeers:withDataMode:error:". [.....pause.....]
Well, this was going to be a question but in writing all this to explain the problem, the answer just dawned on me. Did a few tests and verified it now works. The issue was not in sendDataToAllPeers, it was in the conversion of the NSString (strToSend) to NSData:
packet = [strToSend dataUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];
Specifically, it was the degree sign character (little circle, ASCII 176). NSASCIIStringEncoding only includes ASCII characters up to 127 so don't use any above that. I'm sure there was a quicker way to find the problem, but I don't know Objective-C or Xcode's debugging facility well enough yet.
Whew! Several hours to discover that little tidbit. I did learn a lot, though, and that's always a good thing!
