Trying to parse `request.body` from POST in Django

Question

For some reason I cannot figure out why Django isn't handling my request.body content correctly.

It is being sent in JSON format, and looking at the Network tab in Dev Tools shows this as the request payload:

{creator: "creatorname", content: "postcontent", date: "04/21/2015"}

which is exactly how I want it to be sent to my API.

In Django I have a view that accepts this request as a parameter and just for my testing purposes, should print request.body["content"] to the console.

Of course, nothing is being printed out, but when I print request.body I get this:

b'{"creator":"creatorname","content":"postcontent","date":"04/21/2015"}'

so I know that I do have a body being sent.

I've tried using json = json.loads(request.body) to no avail either. Printing json after setting that variable also returns nothing.

Solution

In Python 3.0 to Python 3.5.x, json.loads() will only accept a unicode string, so you must decode request.body (which is a byte string) before passing it to json.loads().

body_unicode = request.body.decode('utf-8')
body = json.loads(body_unicode)
content = body['content']

In Python 3.6, json.loads() accepts bytes or bytearrays. Therefore you shouldn't need to decode request.body (assuming it's encoded in UTF-8, UTF-16 or UTF-32).

Comments

[Zach]

This solved my problem! And accessing the elements works like body['keyname']. Thank you very much.

[Jimmy Obonyo Abor]

This was very insightfull after countless nights

[JChao]

thank you. i had the same problem only for one env and it turns out the problematic env is using py3.5

[AnonymousUser]

It didn't work, I get the same error.

[Alasdair]

@DerekPK please ask a new question and include your code and the full error message so that other users see it. I don’t think you’ll get help in the comments here.