I am trying to pass login credentials to a PHP script that I have in my iPhone app. When I pull a password with special characters the password is missing certain characters especially the percent sign. I am trying to encode the text but even before I send it, the percent sign is missing.

//password_field is a UITextField holding the password: !@#$%^&*()
NSString *tmpPass = [password_field.text stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; 

NSLog(p_field.text);
NSLog(tmpPass);

This is what appears in the console:

!@#$^&*()

[email protected]&*()

Is there any reason why it would be dropping the percent sign?