Python requests module: urlencoding json data

Question

I'm working on an API wrapper. The spec I'm trying to build to has the following request in it:

curl -H "Content-type:application/json" -X POST -d data='{"name":"Partner13", "email":"[email protected]"}' http://localhost:5000/

This request produces the following response from a little test server I setup to see exatly what headers/params etc are sent as. This little script produces:

uri: http://localhost:5000/,
method: POST,
api_key: None,
content_type: application/json,
params: None,
data: data={"name":"Partner13", "email":"[email protected]"}

So that above is the result I want my python script to create when it hits the little test script.

I'm using the python requests module, which is the most beautiful HTTP lib I have ever used. So here is my python code:

uri = "http://localhost:5000/"
headers = {'content-type': 'application/json' }
params = {}
data = {"name":"Partner13", "email":"[email protected]"}
params["data"] = json.dumps(data)
r = requests.post(uri, data=params, headers=headers)

So simple enough stuff. Set the headers, and create a dictionary for the POST parameters. That dictionary has one entry called "data" which is the JSON string of the data I want to send to the server. Then I call the post. However, the result my little test script gives back is:

uri: http://localhost:5000/,
method: POST,
api_key: None,
content_type: application/json,
params: None,
data: data=%7B%22name%22%3A+%22Partner13%22%2C+%22email%22%3A+%22example%40example.com%22%7D

So essentially the json data I wanted to send under the data parameter has been urlendcoded.

Does anyone know how to fix this? I have looked through the requests documentation and cannot seem to find a way to not auto urlencode the send data.

Thanks very much, Kevin

Answer 1

When creating the object for the data keyword, simply assign a variable the result of json.dumps(data).

Also, because HTTP POST can accept both url parameters as well as data in the body of the request, and because the requests.post function has a keyword argument named "params", it might be better to use a different variable name for readability. The requests docs use the variable name "payload", so thats what I use.

data = {"name":"Partner13", "email":"[email protected]"}
payload = json.dumps(data)
r = requests.post(uri, data=payload, headers=headers)

Answer 2

Requests automatically URL encodes dictionaries passed as data here. John_GG's solution works because rather than posting a dictionary containing the JSON encoded string in the 'data' field it simply passes the JSON encoded string directly: strings are not automatically encoded. I can't say I understand the reason for this behaviour in Requests but regardless, it is what it is. There is no way to toggle this behaviour off that I can find.

Best of luck with it, Kevin.