How can I read the data received in application/x-www-form-urlencoded format on Node server?

Question

I'm receiving data on a webhook URL as a POST request. Note that the content type of this request is application/x-www-form-urlencoded.

It's a server-to-server request. And On my Node server, I simply tried to read the received data by using req.body.parameters but resulting values are "undefined"?

So how can I read the data request data? Do I need to parse the data? Do I need to install any npm module? Can you write a code snippet explaining the case?

Answer 1

If you are using Express.js as Node.js web application framework, then use ExpressJS body-parser.

The sample code will be like this.

var bodyParser = require('body-parser');
app.use(bodyParser.json()); // support json encoded bodies
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true })); // support encoded bodies

// With body-parser configured, now create our route. We can grab POST 
// parameters using req.body.variable_name

// POST http://localhost:8080/api/books
// parameters sent with 
app.post('/api/books', function(req, res) {
    var book_id = req.body.id;
    var bookName = req.body.token;
    //Send the response back
    res.send(book_id + ' ' + bookName);
});

Answer 2

If you are using restify, it would be similar:

var server = restify.createServer()
server.listen(port, () => console.log(`${server.name} listening ${server.url}`))
server.use(restify.plugins.bodyParser()) // can parse Content-type: 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'
server.post('/your_url', your_handler_func)

Answer 3

The accepted answer uses express and the body-parser middleware for express. But if you just want to parse the payload of an application/x-www-form-urlencoded ContentType sent to your Node http server, then you could accomplish this without the extra bloat of Express.

The key thing you mentioned is the http method is POST. Consequently, with application/x-www-form-urlencoded, the params will not be encoded in the query string. Rather, the payload will be sent in the request body, using the same format as the query string:

param=value&param2=value2 

In order to get the payload in the request body, we can use StringDecoder, which decodes buffer objects into strings in a manner that preserves the encoded multi-byte UTF8 characters. So we can use the on method to bind the 'data' and 'end' event to the request object, adding the characters in our buffer:

const StringDecoder = require('string_decoder').StringDecoder;
const http = require('http');

const httpServer = http.createServer((req, res) => {
  const decoder = new StringDecoder('utf-8');
  let buffer = '';

  req.on('data', (chunk) => {
    buffer += decoder.write(chunk);
  });

  req.on('end', () => {
    buffer += decoder.end();
    res.writeHead(200, 'OK', { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
    res.write('the response:\n\n');
    res.write(buffer + '\n\n');
    res.end('End of message to browser');
  });
};

httpServer.listen(3000, () => console.log('Listening on port 3000') );