python requests – POST Multipart/form-data without filename in HTTP request

Question

I am trying to replicate the following POST request using the requests module in python:

POST /example/asdfas HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/28.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------241652170216373
Content-Length: 279

-----------------------------241652170216373
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="value_1"

12345
-----------------------------241652170216373
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="value_2"

67890
-----------------------------241652170216373--

The documentation for requests suggests that the files argument should be used.

When I attempt the following call:

import requests
requests.post('http://example.com/example/asdfas', files={'value_1': '12345', 
                                                          'value_2': '67890'})

I get the following HTTP request:

'Accept': '*/*', 
'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate, compress', 
'Content-Length': '264', 
'User-Agent': 'python-requests/2.2.1 CPython/3.3.2 Windows/7', 
'Content-Type': 'multipart/form-data; boundary=273f13699c02429db4eb95c97f757d38'
--273f13699c02429db4eb95c97f757d38
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="value_1"; filename="value_1"

12345
--273f13699c02429db4eb95c97f757d38
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="value_2"; filename="value_2"

67890
--273f13699c02429db4eb95c97f757d38--

I have also tried to use the data argument:

import requests
requests.post('http://example.com/example/asdfas', data={'value_1': '12345', 
                                                         'value_2': '67890'})

resulting in the following HTTP request:

'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded', 
'Content-Length': '27', 
'User-Agent': 'python-requests/2.2.1 CPython/3.3.2 Windows/7', 
'Accept': '*/*', 
'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate, compress'
value_2=67890&value_1=12345

The issue I’m having is that using the files argument results in a call that the server doesn’t recognize, presumably due to the unexpected “filename” information sent in the HTTP request. Using the data argument sends the wrong Content-Type header.

The first request is known to be working on the server I wish to send the request to – what is the correct function call to identically replicate the first HTTP request?

Edit:
Sample HTML form to replicate the working request:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title></title>
</head>
<body>
    <form action="http://example.com/example/asdfas" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
        <label for="v1">Value 1</label>
        <input id="v1" type="text" name="value_1">
        <label for="v2">Value 2</label>
        <input id="v2" type="text" name="value_2">
        <input type="submit">
    </form>
</body>
</html>

Asked By: sornars

||

Source

Answer 1

The solution is to use tuples when passing parameters to the files argument:

import requests
requests.post('http://example.com/example/asdfas', files={'value_1': (None, '12345'), 'value_2': (None, '67890')})

Works as expected:

'Accept': '*/*', 
'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate, compress', 
'Content-Length': '228', 
'User-Agent': 'python-requests/2.2.1 CPython/3.3.2 Windows/7', 
'Content-Type': 'multipart/form-data; boundary=85e90a4bbb05474ca1e23dbebdd68ed9'

--85e90a4bbb05474ca1e23dbebdd68ed9
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="value_1"

12345
--85e90a4bbb05474ca1e23dbebdd68ed9
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="value_2"

67890
--85e90a4bbb05474ca1e23dbebdd68ed9--

Answered By: sornars

Answer 2

import requests
from requests_toolbelt import MultipartEncoder

url = 'http://example.com/example/asdfas'
fields = {'value_1':'12345', 'value_2': '67890'}

data = MultipartEncoder(fields=fields)
headers["Content-type"] = m.content_type

requests.post(url=url, data=data, headers=headers)

Answered By: raitisd

python requests – POST Multipart/form-data without filename in HTTP request

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