Question

I want to send a simple string from Python 3 to a PHP site that converts it into a .txt file. My entire code looks like this:

Python:

import urllib.parse
import urllib.request

str1 = "abcdefg"

url = "http://site.net/post.php"

aa = str1.encode('utf-8')
req = urllib.request.Request(url, aa)
req.add_header('Content-Type', 'this/that')
urllib.request.urlopen(req, data=aa)

PHP:

<?php

$handle = fopen("/dir/".name.".txt", "w");

$myContent = $_POST[aa];

fwrite($handle, $myContent);

fclose($handle);

?>

Python accesses the site, and a .txt file gets created, except the file is blank. I’ve tried changing $_POST to $_GET and $_REQUEST, as well as placing single and double quotes around 'aa' in various places. I suspect that Python and PHP aren’t communicating about the name of the string/data that I want it to interpret.

EDIT: This PHP code already handles POST data from another website. The issue only arises with Python compatibility

Answer 1

The data you’re sending is invalid. Following the documentation:

data should be a buffer in the standard application/x-www-form-urlencoded format. The urllib.parse.urlencode() function takes a mapping or sequence of 2-tuples and returns a string in this format. It should be encoded to bytes before being used as the data parameter.

The documentation also contains a simple example you just need to follow:

import urllib.request
import urllib.parse

data = urllib.parse.urlencode({'spam': 1, 'eggs': 2, 'bacon': 0})
data = data.encode('utf-8')
request = urllib.request.Request("http://requestb.in/xrbl82xr")

# adding charset parameter to the Content-Type header.
request.add_header("Content-Type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=utf-8")

f = urllib.request.urlopen(request, data)
print(f.read().decode('utf-8'))