Question
I want to be able to get the data sent to my Flask app. I've tried accessing
request.data
but it is an empty string. How do you access request data?
from flask import request
@app.route('/', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def parse_request():
data = request.data # data is empty
# need posted data here
The answer to this question led me to ask Get raw POST body in Python Flask regardless of Content-Type header next, which is about getting the raw data rather than the parsed data.
Answer
The docs describe the
attributes available on the request
object (from flask import request
)
during a request. In most common cases request.data
will be empty because
it's used as a fallback:
request.data
Contains the incoming request data as string in case it came with a mimetype Flask does not handle.
request.args
: the key/value pairs in the URL query stringrequest.form
: the key/value pairs in the body, from a HTML post form, or JavaScript request that isn't JSON encodedrequest.files
: the files in the body, which Flask keeps separate fromform
. HTML forms must useenctype=multipart/form-data
or files will not be uploaded.request.values
: combinedargs
andform
, preferringargs
if keys overlaprequest.json
: parsed JSON data. The request must have theapplication/json
content type, or userequest.get_json(force=True)
to ignore the content type.
All of these are
MultiDict
instances (except for json
). You can access values using:
request.form['name']
: use indexing if you know the key existsrequest.form.get('name')
: useget
if the key might not existrequest.form.getlist('name')
: usegetlist
if the key is sent multiple times and you want a list of values.get
only returns the first value.