Python HTTP Request Binary Data using Requests

Question

The following code only works in curl. It would be nice if you could tell me why it isnt working in Python using Requests

curl 'http://cdcnepal.com/Modules/HOmeMoviesLists/WebService2.asmx/GetShowsByDate' \
 -H 'Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8' \
 -d '{"portalId":"1","showDate":"26/05/2014","flag":0,"size":9}'

However in Python with the following code

import requests
import json
url = """http://cdcnepal.com/Modules/HOmeMoviesLists/WebService2.asmx/GetShowsByDate"""
headers = {"content-type":["application/json", "charset=UTF-8"]}
payload = {"portalId":"1","showDate":"26/05/2014","flag":0,"size":9}
r = requests.get(url, headers=headers, data=payload)
print r.text

Originally the curl request had other content, below, however I realised I could remove several. I'm not sure that is causing the error because the curl request is working. I'm not getting the same response from both the code.

This might be useful. A Curl Requests extracted from Chrome Dev Tools

curl 'http://cdcnepal.com/Modules/HOmeMoviesLists/WebService2.asmx/GetShowsByDate'
 -H 'Cookie: OriginalReferrer=https://www.google.com/;
     OriginalURL=http://cdcnepal.com/;
     ASP.NET_SessionId=i5lbnql5hpp0wm1ywyqbywtj;
     VisitCount=4' 
 -H 'Origin: http://cdcnepal.com' 
 -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch' 
 -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,hi;q=0.6' 
 -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_3)
     AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.114 Safari/537.36' 
 -H 'Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8' 
 -H 'Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01' 
 -H 'Referer:http://cdcnepal.com/Home.aspx' 
 -H 'X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' 
 -H 'DNT: 1' 
 --data-binary '{"portalId":"1","showDate":"27/05/2014","flag":0,"size":9}' --compressed

Answer 1

The curl -d switch sends a POST request, but you are using requests.get() instead, sending a GET request (whose body is ignored).

Make it a POST instead, by using request.post():

import requests
import json

url = "http://cdcnepal.com/Modules/HOmeMoviesLists/WebService2.asmx/GetShowsByDate"
headers = {"content-type": "application/json; charset=UTF-8"}
payload = {"portalId":"1","showDate":"26/05/2014","flag":0,"size":9}
r = requests.post(url, headers=headers, data=json.dumps(payload))
print r.text

You also need to:

1. not use a list for the content-type header, there is no support for paramaters being specified separately.
2. Encode your JSON data to a JSON string; requests doesn't do this for you. Instead, a dictionary passed to data is encoded as application/x-www-form-urlencoded data instead.

You can compare the curl command with requests more easily using http://httpbin.org/post:

$ curl http://httpbin.org/post \
>  -H 'Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8' \
>  -d '{"portalId":"1","showDate":"26/05/2014","flag":0,"size":9}'

{
  "args": {},
  "data": "{\"portalId\":\"1\",\"showDate\":\"26/05/2014\",\"flag\":0,\"size\":9}",
  "files": {},
  "form": {},
  "headers": {
    "Accept": "*/*",
    "Connection": "close",
    "Content-Length": "58",
    "Content-Type": "application/json; charset=UTF-8",
    "Host": "httpbin.org",
    "User-Agent": "curl/7.30.0",
    "X-Request-Id": "78d7bb7d-e29b-482b-908a-48d2395a050f"
  },
  "json": {
    "flag": 0,
    "portalId": "1",
    "showDate": "26/05/2014",
    "size": 9
  },
  "origin": "84.92.98.170",
  "url": "http://httpbin.org/post"
}

and

>>> import requests
>>> import json
>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> url = 'http://httpbin.org/post'
>>> headers = {"content-type":"application/json; charset=UTF-8"}
>>> payload = {"portalId":"1","showDate":"26/05/2014","flag":0,"size":9}
>>> r = requests.post(url, headers=headers, data=json.dumps(payload))
>>> pprint(r.json())
{u'args': {},
 u'data': u'{"portalId": "1", "flag": 0, "size": 9, "showDate": "26/05/2014"}',
 u'files': {},
 u'form': {},
 u'headers': {u'Accept': u'*/*',
              u'Accept-Encoding': u'gzip, deflate, compress',
              u'Connection': u'close',
              u'Content-Length': u'65',
              u'Content-Type': u'application/json; charset=UTF-8',
              u'Host': u'httpbin.org',
              u'User-Agent': u'python-requests/2.2.1 CPython/2.7.6 Darwin/13.1.0',
              u'X-Request-Id': u'06d6b542-c279-4898-8701-2c0d502aa36e'},
 u'json': {u'flag': 0,
           u'portalId': u'1',
           u'showDate': u'26/05/2014',
           u'size': 9},
 u'origin': u'84.92.98.170',
 u'url': u'http://httpbin.org/post'}

Both cases show the same json dictionary being returned.

If you are using requests version 2.4.2 or newer, you can also leave the JSON encoding to the library; it'll set the correct Content-Type header too, if you pass in the data to send as the json keyword argument:

import requests

url = "http://cdcnepal.com/Modules/HOmeMoviesLists/WebService2.asmx/GetShowsByDate"
payload = {"portalId":"1","showDate":"26/05/2014","flag":0,"size":9}
r = requests.post(url, json=payload)
print r.text