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Matt Russell
5,810 PointsGenerating form data from python
I wanted to understand how the html form was constructing the data to send to my flask server, so I attempted to send the form data directly from python. However, I could not replicate what the html form was doing. Does anyone know what I am doing wrong?
First, I added this line to the "save" function:
print "Request form: {}".format(request.form)
When submitting a name from the index website, that line prints this:
Request form: ImmutableMultiDict([('name', u'Name-from-website-form')])
Then I ran this very small python program:
---------------------------------
import json
import urllib2
url="http://0.0.0.0:8000/save"
data = { 'name': 'name-from-python' }
req = urllib2.Request(url)
urllib2.urlopen(req, json.dumps(data)).read()
---------------------------------
When running this, the print line from my flask server showed this:
Request form: ImmutableMultiDict([('{"name": "name-from-python"}', u'')])
In case it's not clear, the dictionary is a mapping from '{"name": "name-from-python"}' to an empty string -- clearly not what I intended.
What am I doing wrong?
[MOD: added ```python formating -cf]
1 Answer
![Chris Freeman](https://uploads.teamtreehouse.com/production/profile-photos/1153532/micro_image.jpg)
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,425 PointsHi Matt,
First, are you using Python 2? The urllib2 module was replaced in Python 3 with urllib.request
and urllib.error
.
Working wth Python2, I was able to get the following code to work (I modified to use my port 8080, and route to formdata for my setup):
# post data to flask server
import urllib
import urllib2
url="http://0.0.0.0:8080/formdata"
data = urllib.urlencode({'name' : 'name-from-python'})
content = urllib2.urlopen(url=url, data=data).read()
You can optionally add print(content)
formdata
route:
# added to app.py:
from flask import request
@app.route('/formdata', methods=('GET', 'POST'))
def formdata():
try:
print(request.form)
except:
print("formdata: no form")
return redirect(url_for('index'))
Running python app.py
in one window and running the "post data to flask server" code above in Python 2 shell in another window, produced the following from the flask app:
ImmutableMultiDict([('name', 'name-from-python')])
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Oct/2015 23:27:42] "POST /formdata HTTP/1.1" 302 -
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Oct/2015 23:27:42] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 -
If you want more introspection, you could add print(dir(request))
or print(dir(request.form))
to your save
route to drill down into the posted request content.
Also, I found these StackOverflow posts helpful: making a post call instead of get using urllib2 and python urllib urllib2 post
Matt Russell
5,810 PointsMatt Russell
5,810 PointsSorry, the formatting of the pasted python program seems wrong. Trying again: