Swift 3 - Apostrophes being converted to â on screen-scrape

Question

In my Swift 3 application, I am getting HTML text from a web api to render inside of a UIWebView. However, apostrophes specifically and maybe other special characters are rendering as accent letters instead of their real value. For example, the text for “Transportation’s” displays as “Transportationâs”.

The code is simple.

var myHTMLString = try String(contentsOf: myURL, encoding: .ascii)
//myHTMLString = "some bâd string"
webview.loadHTMLString(myHTMLString, baseURL: nil);

The values are correct on the API. Why is this happening when grabbing?

Answer 1

Change the encoding to .utf8

I'm not sure why the .ascii isn't working, though I suspect it has to do with HTML entity encoding. If I find a reason, I'll update this answer...

Update: This w3schools.com page explains that HTML is now considered UTF-8 standard. UTF-8 can handle a larger set of characters. Apparently the webview browser understands HTML entities (for example, ' representing an apostrophe) in UTF-8, but not ASCII.