EXC_BAD_ACCESS Error In App, Alamofire 3.1.2 - iphone

Question

I'm running Xcode 7.1, with an iOS device on 9.1, and the latest version of Alamofire, I believe it's 3.1.2.
I've seen others with similar errors - this one from SO and this one from their Github issues page - to mine, but the resolutions did not work for me. The resolutions that worked in these scenarios seemed to be deleting the DerivedData folders, but that doesn't work in my situation.
The issue is that I can make web requests with Alamofire when I run in the simulator, but I get the following error (in the image) when I install the application on my device.
I've tried using a device running 9.1, 9.0.1 and 8.3. All of these devices crash when I attempt to make the web request. I'm stuck on this and I've made no headway. This worked until I updated all my pods in my podfile and my Xcode version a couple of nights ago.
I'm a newbie at iOS development, so if you need to see more error logs or things of that nature, let me know and I'll do my best to get you those. Any help is appreciated.
Edit: Adding code for the Alamofire.request method as requested. Also adding code for the referenced Manager.sharedInstance.request method. These are methods within the Alamofire library itself.
// Alamofire.request
public func request(
method: Method,
_ URLString: URLStringConvertible,
parameters: [String: AnyObject]? = nil,
encoding: ParameterEncoding = .URL,
headers: [String: String]? = nil)
-> Request
{
return Manager.sharedInstance.request(
method,
URLString,
parameters: parameters,
encoding: encoding,
headers: headers
)
}
// Manager.sharedInstance.request
public func request(
method: Method,
_ URLString: URLStringConvertible,
parameters: [String: AnyObject]? = nil,
encoding: ParameterEncoding = .URL,
headers: [String: String]? = nil)
-> Request
{
let mutableURLRequest = URLRequest(method, URLString, headers: headers)
let encodedURLRequest = encoding.encode(mutableURLRequest, parameters: parameters).0
return request(encodedURLRequest)
}

Answer 1

One problem is that stringByAddingPercentEncodingWithAllowedCharacters returns an optional, and when you do string interpolation, you're going to get Optional(...) appearing in the string. Thus when it tries to create a URL from that, it's undoubtedly failing. Print the uri string and you'll see the issue. E.g., if the searchTerm was "foo bar", the uri would become:
https://api.spotify.com/v1/search&q=Optional("foo%20bar")&type=artist,album,track
But that's not correct. Add a ! to the end of the expression to unwrap it:
let searchTermEncoded = searchTerm.stringByAddingPercentEncodingWithAllowedCharacters(NSCharacterSet.URLQueryAllowedCharacterSet())!
And then the URI will be (largely) correct.
--
I'd suggest not doing this percent escaping yourself (as the character set you're using is not correct, even once you do properly unwrap searchTermEncoded). Let Alamofire do this for you:
let urlString = "https://api.spotify.com/v1/search"
let parameters = ["q" : searchTerm, "type" : "artist,album,track"]
Alamofire.request(.GET, urlString, parameters: parameters)
.responseJSON { response in
guard response.result.error == nil else {
print(response.result.error)
return
}
print(response.result.value)
}