POST with NSURLConnection - NO JSON

Question

I am trying to write an iPhone app in Objective-C. I need to POST data using NSURLConnection. Every example I can find deals with JSON; I do not need to use JSON. All I need to

Answer 1

Here's how to create an ordinary post.

First create a request of the right type:

NSURL *URL = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://example.com/somepath"];
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:URL];
request.HTTPMethod = @"POST";

Now format your post data as a URL-encoded string, like this:

NSString *params = @"param1=value1¶m2=value2&etc...";

Remember to encode the individual parameters using percent encoding. You can't entirely rely on the NSString stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding method for this (google to find out why) but it's a good start.

Now we add the post data to your request:

NSData *data = [params dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
[request addValue:@"8bit" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Transfer-Encoding"];
[request addValue:@"application/x-www-form-urlencoded" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Type"];
[request addValue:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%i", [data length]] forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Length"];
[request setHTTPBody:data];

And that's it, now just send your request as normal using NSURLConnection (or whatever).

To interpret the response that comes back, see Maudicus's answer.