I am receiving a request with content-type application/x-www-form-urlencoded. When I try to read the body of the request using cherrypy.request.body.read() the results is b''.
I seem to be able to access the request form parameters using any of these:
cherrypy.request.params
cherrypy.request.body.params
cherrypy.request.body.request_params
But this is inconvenient for my use case, I want to be able to obtain the raw request body regardless of content-type. Also the above 3 give me a dictionary, which isn't the exact format that the request had in its body. Is there a way to do that with cherrypy? Or is this functionality hidden?
Not sure what are you trying to accomplish by not using the already parsed body that correspond to the defined Content-Type... but you can process the body of the request yourself configuring: cherrypy.request.process_request_body = False and read the body with something like:
cherrypy.request.rfile.read(cherrypy.request.headers['Content-Length'])
For more information see: https://github.com/cherrypy/cherrypy/blob/master/cherrypy/_cprequest.py#L292-L315
Fragment of relevant parts of that url:
rfile = None
"""
If the request included an entity (body), it will be available
as a stream in this attribute. However, the rfile will normally
be read for you between the 'before_request_body' hook and the
'before_handler' hook, and the resulting string is placed into
either request.params or the request.body attribute.
You may disable the automatic consumption of the rfile by setting
request.process_request_body to False, either in config for the desired
path, or in an 'on_start_resource' or 'before_request_body' hook.
WARNING: In almost every case, you should not attempt to read from the
rfile stream after CherryPy's automatic mechanism has read it. If you
turn off the automatic parsing of rfile, you should read exactly the
number of bytes specified in request.headers['Content-Length'].
Ignoring either of these warnings may result in a hung request thread
or in corruption of the next (pipelined) request.
"""
process_request_body = True
"""
If True, the rfile (if any) is automatically read and parsed,
and the result placed into request.params or request.body.
"""
body = None
"""
If the request Content-Type is 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'
or multipart, this will be None. Otherwise, this will be an instance
of :class:`RequestBody<cherrypy._cpreqbody.RequestBody>` (which you
can .read()); this value is set between the 'before_request_body' and
'before_handler' hooks (assuming that process_request_body is True."""