Axios posts as JSON object, how to change

Question

As the title states, when you do a

axios.post('/user', {
    firstName: 'Fred',
    lastName: 'Flintstone'
  })
  .then(function (response) {
    console.log(response);
  })
  .catch(function (error) {
    console.log(error);
  });

The data will be in a JSON object, and thus will not be detected by $_REQUEST, and can only be found in php://input.

Is there anyway to change this? I've tried changing the content-type as well, but that didn't help.

Answer 1

Here is what is explained on the github axios page:

By default, axios serializes JavaScript objects to JSON. To send data in the application/x-www-form-urlencoded format instead, you can use one of the following options.

Browser

In a browser, you can use the URLSearchParams API as follows:

const params = new URLSearchParams();
params.append('param1', 'value1');
params.append('param2', 'value2');
axios.post('/foo', params);

Note that URLSearchParams is not supported by all browsers (see caniuse.com), but there is a polyfill available (make sure to polyfill the global environment).

Alternatively, you can encode data using the qs library:

const qs = require('qs');
axios.post('/foo', qs.stringify({ 'bar': 123 }));

Or in another way (ES6),

import qs from 'qs';
const data = { 'bar': 123 };
const options = {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: { 'content-type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' },
  data: qs.stringify(data),
  url,
};
axios(options);