I was able to compare a full sample from the server vs what xcode logged, and found the +
converted to [space]
. Since that was the only character having a problem and url encoding is buggy in iOS, I just did
NSString *dataStr = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"request_data=%@",[reqStr stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"+" withString:@"%2B"]];
The server is accepting them again. I'm still not sure whether the server was the problem or it was iOS. The other OS's that connect use the same application/x-www-form-urlencoded as their content type with no problems.