How to prevent URLComponents().port from adding a question mark before the query (Swift/Xcode)

Question

I am trying to compose a representative URLComponents() in the app I am designing.

Here is the code:

class ViewController: UIViewController {

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()

    var components = URLComponents()

    components.scheme = "http"
    components.host = "0.0.0.0"
    components.port = 9090
    let queryItemToken = URLQueryItem(name: "/predict?text", value: "what's your name?")
    components.queryItems = [queryItemToken]

    print(components.url as Any)
    }
}

Here is the output of the above snippet:

Optional(http://0.0.0.0:9090?/predict?text=what's%20your%20name?)

The above output doesn't work on the server because of the ? between the port and the query! How can I prevent URLComponents() from inserting this redundant ? between the port and the query!

The target output: Optional(http://0.0.0.0:9090/predict?text=what's%20your%20name?)

Answer 1

Thank you all for the response. I got away with all this by doing the following without the need to use URLComponents().

It turned out that sending some raw special characters in the query can be devastating to the request to the network.

And then, I use a dictionary to replace some special characters in the raw input before processing further, everything else works smooth. Thanks a lot for the attention.

So, assuming the user raw input is input:

import UIKit
import Foundation

// An example of a user input
var input = "what's your name?"

// ASCII Encoding Reference: important to allow primary communication with the server
var mods = ["'": "%27",
        "’": "%27",
        " ": "%20",
        "\"" : "%22",
        "<" : "%3C",
        ">" : "%3E"]

for (spChar, repl) in mods {
        input = input.replacingOccurrences(of: spChar, with: repl, options: .literal, range: nil)
    }

let query = "http://0.0.0.0:9090/predict?text=" + input

This is my third day with swift, I am sure there must be cleaner approaches to handle these nuances.

Answer 2

The /predict part is the path, not a query item. text is the actual query parameter.

You want:

var components = URLComponents()
components.scheme = "http"
components.host = "0.0.0.0"
components.port = 9090
components.path = "/predict"
let queryItemToken = URLQueryItem(name: "text", value: "what's your name?")
components.queryItems = [queryItemToken]
print(components.url!)