Question

Edit

Make sure you don’t juxtapose the request and response objects. things will be easier if you dont.

I am trying to POST data from a form with two inputs to a specific url node responds to.
Originally I was using the javascript xmlHTTPrequest object to send it. The data was received but node could never read the object I tried sending which was JSON format. Here is what it looked like when I converted it to a string:

{ output: [], 
  outputEncodings: [],
  writable: true,
  _last: false,
  chunkedEncoding: false,
  shouldKeepAlive: true,
  useChunkedEncodingByDefault: true,
  _hasBody: true,
  _trailer: '',
  finished: false,
  socket: 
   { _handle: 
      { writeQueueSize: 0,
        socket: [Circular],
        onread: [Function: onread] },
     _pendingWriteReqs: 0,
     _flags: 0,
     _connectQueueSize: 0,
     destroyed: false,
     errorEmitted: false,
     bytesRead: 8442,
     bytesWritten: 1669569,
     allowHalfOpen: true,
     writable: true,
     readable: true,

This was not the full string. I switched over to use an ajax post request instead because I thought serializearray() might create a different format that node could read but it was the same. My server side code is essentially just:

function email(request, response)
  form = '';
  request.setEncoding("utf8");
  request.on('data', function(chunk) {
    console.log('data received');
    form += chunk.toString();
  });

  request.on('end', function() {
    console.log('done receiving post data');
  });

My form looks like this

  <form name="email" action="javascript:true;">
    <input type="text" name="address" value="Enter your email address" onFocus="this.value=''">
    <input class="special" type="text" name="honeypot">
    <input type="submit" value="submit">
  </form>

If I try parsing with JSON.parse, there is an error caused by unexpected o
If I try parsing with querystring, it returns an empty object
If I try something like console.log(form.address) the output is undefined but should be one of the values i submitted in the form.

my http server would route to /email and this is the function that responds to /email.

I checked and I know the on ‘data’ event has not expired because my code is set up to notify me of a ‘data’event and I can see the event happening. Locally, this code works fine and I can read the data submitted but on the development server it just doesn’t work.

I know people will say I should be using connect or express but let’s just suppose that was not an option, how could I get node to correctly process this data? The jquery that submits the form is more or less standard. Many thanks!

EDIT:

Sorry, I thought the problem would be fixed as I noticed immediately the posted string was not JSON. Here is the code I am using to send the post.

$(document).ready(function() {
  $("#email").submit(function(event) {
  event.preventDefault();
  var data = $(this).serializeArray();
  $.ajax({
    type: 'POST',
    dataType: 'json',
    url: '/email',
    data: JSON.stringify(data),
    success: function(msg) {
    $("#aviso").html(msg);
    }
    });
  });
}); 

Here is the string the data variable holds:

[
  {
    "name": "address",
    "value": "[e-mail]"
  },
  {
    "name": "honeypot",
    "value": "irobot"
  }
]

This is valid JSON as per jsonlint. But still the same error when it reaches the server. Node handles the ‘data’ event and all is well until I try to parse the string, it causes an error undefined:1 unexpected o.

Answer 1

The data you’re sending is not valid JSON, which requires that all object keys are double-quoted.