with regards to hard coding the url, that defeats what I am trying to do
What you are trying to do at this point is to get something working. Minimizing the number of variables reduces the number of places where something could be going wrong. By hard-coding a known URL for testing purposes you can confirm (or not) that your get() call works, without the variability added by through retrieving and reformatting a URL via the UI. If it works with a hard-coded URL, then it points to a problem in formatting the string you have retrieved from the user interface.

And as it says in the QUrl docs, QStrings should be converted from utf8 if they are passed as a URL. Your code doesn't seem to be doing that.