How would you access form data without using bodyParser?

Question

I always see bodyParser being used to give you access to the posted form stuff. By making it accessible in req.body. But how would you access that data if you didn't want to use bodyParser?

Related/similar question - how does bodyParser provide you with the data in req.body?

Edit: I'm asking about how this stuff works on a low level. This possible duplicate seems to be addressing it by recommending certain middleware and describing how to use them.

Answer 1

bodyParser is a middleware that parses the stream of data to a json. I can't see a reason to not use bodyParser (if you don't want to handle multipart bodies), but you can parse the streaming by yourself if you want to. It will be something like the middleware below:

app.use(function( req, res, next ) {
  var data = '';
  req.on( 'data', function( chunk ) {
    data += chunk;
  });
  req.on( 'end', function() {
    req.rawBody = data;
    console.log( 'on end: ', data )
    if ( data && data.indexOf( '{' ) > -1 ) {
      req.body = JSON.parse( data );
    }
    next();
  });
});

If you want to parse multipart bodies you can use one of the following modules:

• busboy
• multiparty
• formidable
• multer

Answer 2

A cursory answer to this is to use https://github.com/stream-utils/raw-body to parse the request body and then run your JSON.parse on the result. This is how body-parser gets the request body from which it then parses json, urls, and raw text data.