How to POST JSON data with Python Requests?

Question

I need to POST a JSON from a client to a server. I'm using Python 2.7.1 and simplejson. The client is using Requests. The server is CherryPy. I can GET a hard-coded JSON from the server (code not shown), but when I try to POST a JSON to the server, I get "400 Bad Request".

Here is my client code:

data = {'sender':   'Alice',     'receiver': 'Bob',     'message':  'We did it!'} data_json = simplejson.dumps(data) payload = {'json_payload': data_json} r = requests.post("http://localhost:8080", data=payload) 

Here is the server code.

class Root(object):      def __init__(self, content):         self.content = content         print self.content  # this works      exposed = True      def GET(self):         cherrypy.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/json'         return simplejson.dumps(self.content)      def POST(self):         self.content = simplejson.loads(cherrypy.request.body.read()) 

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Starting with Requests version 2.4.2, you can use the json= parameter (which takes a dictionary) instead of data= (which takes a string) in the call:

>>> import requests >>> r = requests.post('http://httpbin.org/post', json={"key": "value"}) >>> r.status_code 200 >>> r.json() {'args': {},  'data': '{"key": "value"}',  'files': {},  'form': {},  'headers': {'Accept': '*/*',              'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate',              'Connection': 'close',              'Content-Length': '16',              'Content-Type': 'application/json',              'Host': 'httpbin.org',              'User-Agent': 'python-requests/2.4.3 CPython/3.4.0',              'X-Request-Id': 'xx-xx-xx'},  'json': {'key': 'value'},  'origin': 'x.x.x.x',  'url': 'http://httpbin.org/post'} 

Answer 2

It turns out I was missing the header information. The following works:

url = "http://localhost:8080" data = {'sender': 'Alice', 'receiver': 'Bob', 'message': 'We did it!'} headers = {'Content-type': 'application/json', 'Accept': 'text/plain'} r = requests.post(url, data=json.dumps(data), headers=headers)