How to use cURL requests with Swift URLSession - swift

Question

I have a request that looks like this:
curl --header "token: YOUR TOKEN HERE" --data "a=new_session" site url
I understand and can use it via Terminal but I'm trying to do it with Swift and having some issues understanding how to pass parameters and make a request.
What I've tried:
guard let url = URL(string: siteURL) else { return }
var request = URLRequest(url: url)
request.httpMethod = "POST"
request.addValue(token, forHTTPHeaderField: "token")
request.addValue("new_session", forHTTPHeaderField: "a")
URLSession.shared.dataTask(with: request) { (data, response, error) in
guard error == nil else { print(error!.localizedDescription); return }
guard let data = data else { print("Empty data"); return }
if let str = String(data: data, encoding: .utf8) {
print(str)
}
}.resume()
And that doesn't seem to work, I'm a very new to all this networking stuff and I don't even know why we pass token after ":" and new_session after "=" so I would appreciate any help!

Answer 1

You're solution is almost correct. You're just incorrectly converting the --data flag from the curl request. The format of your data is form encoded because it has the format of key=value. So you just need to add the form encoded data (in this case a=new_session) to the body of your HTTP request instead of as a header. Also, make sure to set the proper content type.
It would look something like this:
func makeRequest(siteURL: String, token: String) {
guard let url = URL(string: siteURL) else { return }
var request = URLRequest(url: url)
request.httpMethod = "POST"
request.addValue(token, forHTTPHeaderField: "token")
// These two lines are what you were missing.
request.httpBody = "a=new_session".data(using: .utf8)!
request.addValue("application/x-www-form-urlencoded", forHTTPHeaderField: "Content-Type")
URLSession.shared.dataTask(with: request) { (data, response, error) in
// handle the request
}.resume()
}
The URLSession request and curl request should be equivalent now.