Previously, I asked How to get data received in Flask request because request.data
was empty. The answer explained that request.data
is the raw post body, but will be empty if form data is parsed. How can I get the raw post body unconditionally?
@app.route('/', methods=['POST'])
def parse_request():
data = request.data # empty in some cases
# always need raw data here, not parsed form data
Use request.get_data()
to get the raw data, regardless of content type. The data is cached and you can subsequently access request.data
, request.json
, request.form
at will.
If you access request.data
first, it will call get_data
with an argument to parse form data first. If the request has a form content type (multipart/form-data
, application/x-www-form-urlencoded
, or application/x-url-encoded
) then the raw data will be consumed. request.data
and request.json
will appear empty in this case.
request.stream
is the stream of raw data passed to the application by the WSGI server. No parsing is done when reading it, although you usually want request.get_data()
instead.
data = request.stream.read()
The stream will be empty if it was previously read by request.data
or another attribute.
I created a WSGI middleware that stores the raw body from the environ['wsgi.input']
stream. I saved the value in the WSGI environ so I could access it from request.environ['body_copy']
within my app.
This isn't necessary in Werkzeug or Flask, as request.get_data()
will get the raw data regardless of content type, but with better handling of HTTP and WSGI behavior.
This reads the entire body into memory, which will be an issue if for example a large file is posted. This won't read anything if the Content-Length
header is missing, so it won't handle streaming requests.
from io import BytesIO
class WSGICopyBody(object):
def __init__(self, application):
self.application = application
def __call__(self, environ, start_response):
length = int(environ.get('CONTENT_LENGTH') or 0)
body = environ['wsgi.input'].read(length)
environ['body_copy'] = body
# replace the stream since it was exhausted by read()
environ['wsgi.input'] = BytesIO(body)
return self.application(environ, start_response)
app.wsgi_app = WSGICopyBody(app.wsgi_app)
request.environ['body_copy']
request.data
will be empty if request.headers["Content-Type"]
is recognized as form data, which will be parsed into request.form
. To get the raw data regardless of content type, use request.get_data()
.
request.data
calls request.get_data(parse_form_data=True)
, which results in the different behavior for form data.
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