Get the POST request body from HttpServletRequest

Question

In Java 8, you can do it in a simpler and clean way :

if ("POST".equalsIgnoreCase(request.getMethod())) 
{
   test = request.getReader().lines().collect(Collectors.joining(System.lineSeparator()));
}

Easy way with commons-io.

IOUtils.toString(request.getReader());

https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-io/javadocs/api-2.5/org/apache/commons/io/IOUtils.html

Be aware, that your code is quite noisy. I know the thread is old, but a lot of people will read it anyway. You could do the same thing using the guava library with:

    if ("POST".equalsIgnoreCase(request.getMethod())) {
        test = CharStreams.toString(request.getReader());
    }

If all you want is the POST request body, you could use a method like this:

static String extractPostRequestBody(HttpServletRequest request) throws IOException {
    if ("POST".equalsIgnoreCase(request.getMethod())) {
        Scanner s = new Scanner(request.getInputStream(), "UTF-8").useDelimiter("\\A");
        return s.hasNext() ? s.next() : "";
    }
    return "";
}

Credit to: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5445161/1389219

This works for both GET and POST:

@Context
private HttpServletRequest httpRequest;


private void printRequest(HttpServletRequest httpRequest) {
    System.out.println(" \n\n Headers");

    Enumeration headerNames = httpRequest.getHeaderNames();
    while(headerNames.hasMoreElements()) {
        String headerName = (String)headerNames.nextElement();
        System.out.println(headerName + " = " + httpRequest.getHeader(headerName));
    }

    System.out.println("\n\nParameters");

    Enumeration params = httpRequest.getParameterNames();
    while(params.hasMoreElements()){
        String paramName = (String)params.nextElement();
        System.out.println(paramName + " = " + httpRequest.getParameter(paramName));
    }

    System.out.println("\n\n Row data");
    System.out.println(extractPostRequestBody(httpRequest));
}

static String extractPostRequestBody(HttpServletRequest request) {
    if ("POST".equalsIgnoreCase(request.getMethod())) {
        Scanner s = null;
        try {
            s = new Scanner(request.getInputStream(), "UTF-8").useDelimiter("\\A");
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        return s.hasNext() ? s.next() : "";
    }
    return "";
}