Other Request Bodies¶

The previous example demonstrated how to accept the payload of a POST carrying HTML form data. What about POST requests with data in some other format? Or even PUT requests? Here is an example which demonstrates how to get any request body, regardless of its format - using the request’s content attribute.

The only significant difference between this example and the previous is that instead of accessing request.args in render_POST , it uses request.content to get the request’s body directly:

...
    def render_POST(self, request):
        content = request.content.read().decode("utf-8")
        escapedContent = cgi.escape(content)
        return (b"<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><meta charset='utf-8'>"
                b"<title></title></head><body>"
                b"You submitted: " +
                escapedContent.encode("utf-8"))

request.content is a file-like object, so the body is read from it. The exact type may vary, so avoid relying on non-file methods you may find (such as getvalue when request.content happens to be a BytesIO instance).

Here’s the complete source for this example - again, almost identical to the previous POST example, with only render_POST changed:

from twisted.web.server import Site
from twisted.web.resource import Resource
from twisted.internet import reactor, endpoints

import cgi

class FormPage(Resource):
    def render_GET(self, request):
        return (b"<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><meta charset='utf-8'>"
                b"<title></title></head><body>"
                b"<form method='POST'><input name='the-field'></form>")

    def render_POST(self, request):
        content = request.content.read().decode("utf-8")
        escapedContent = cgi.escape(content)
        return (b"<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><meta charset='utf-8'>"
                b"<title></title></head><body>"
                b"You submitted: " +
                escapedContent.encode("utf-8"))

root = Resource()
root.putChild(b"form", FormPage())
factory = Site(root)
endpoint = endpoints.TCP4ServerEndpoint(reactor, 8880)
endpoint.listen(factory)
reactor.run()