iPhone Mail Reformatting

I recently wired up the ability to email lists from an iPhone app I'm writing. Setting this up was pretty straightforward (see the Apple docs on the subject).

But since I'm sending lists, and since my list might have headings with one level of subitems, I wanted to create an email that looked like this:

Heading
   Item 1
   Item 2
   Item 3

I added the appropriate spaces to my email body, URL encoded it with NSString's stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding method, and shipped it off to Mail with [[UIApplicaton sharedApplication] openUrl:]

What I saw when Mail started was this:

Heading
Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

I assumed my indent code didn't work, so I looked at the result in the debugger. The encoded string had the three spaces in front of each item; Mail had decided it didn't like the spaces at the beginning of the line. I tried using a tab instead. No dice.

Thinking that I could trick Mail by putting a different character at the beginning, I sent it email that should have looked like this:

Heading
-   Item 1
-   Item 2
-   Item 3

What I got was:

Heading
- Item 1
- Item 2
- Item 3

Mail not only doesn't like white space at the beginning of the line; it doesn't like multiple spaces at all.

I find this very annoying. I'm sending Mail a piece of text that I want it to use, and it's making its own decisions about that text. Mail would let me type " Item 1"; it just won't take it from a passed-in URL.

Grr. In the end, I decided to just live with the last version of the list. A friend suggested "--Item 1" but I don't like the way the dashes run into the text in that form. Maybe "-- Item 1."