How do I get input POST data in Node.js?

Question

I am learning Node.js. I am trying to learn it without using 3rd party modules or frameworks.

I am trying to figure out how I can get the POST data from each individual input.

I am making a login system:

<form method="POST" action="/login">
   <input name="email" placeholder="Email Address" />
   <input name="password" placeholder="Password" />
</form>

So the user logins and the input data is POSTed to the server.

The Node.js server is ready for this POST :

 var http = require('http');
 var server = http.createServer(function(req, res) {


 if(req.method == POST && req.url == '/login') {


 var body = "";

 req.on('data', function (chunk) {
 body += chunk;
  });


 req.on('end', function () {
 console.log(body);
 });

 }

 });
 server.listen(80);

The node.js server code above can console.log the body. For example, this will console.log the post data like this:
[email protected] password=thisismypw

BUT how do I get the input data individually? I think in PHP I could target each input this way:

  $_POST['email']  and $_POST['password']

and I could put these values into a variable and use them to INSERT or CHECK the database.

Can someone please show me how I can do this in Node.js? Please no modules barebones please!

Answer 1

For application/x-www-form-urlencoded forms (the default) you can typically just use the querystring parser on the data:

var http = require('http'),
    qs = require('querystring');

var server = http.createServer(function(req, res) {
  if (req.method === 'POST' && req.url === '/login') {
    var body = '';
    req.on('data', function(chunk) {
      body += chunk;
    });
    req.on('end', function() {
      var data = qs.parse(body);
      // now you can access `data.email` and `data.password`
      res.writeHead(200);
      res.end(JSON.stringify(data));
    });
  } else {
    res.writeHead(404);
    res.end();
  }
});

server.listen(80);

For multipart/form-data forms you're going to be better off using a third party module because parsing those kinds of requests are much more difficult to get right.