After doing req.stream.read(), is there a way to read the POST data again?

[dukedougal]

req.stream.seek(0) does not seem to work.

[tudborg]

I'll try to answer this then :)

There is no way to read req.stream again. the req.stream is just the wsgi.input (although it might be wrapped in some extra stuff) for the request. You need to store it somewhere if you need to read it again.

However, as a hack, i think you could create a hook that replaces the stream with a StringIO object, that reads the entire stream the first time.

Note that if the content type is application/x-www-form-urlencoded the stream will have already been read, and the above aproach wouldn't work.

You could also extend Request and read the stream into a StringIO. Note however that if someone POST's a 4GB file, you will read all of that into memory, so you might want to stop reading at some number of bytes.

[kgriffs]

Generally, I'd like to avoid having Falcon itself automagically buffer the input stream, since as @tbug mentioned, there are different ways you would want to do it (or not do it at all), depending on your use case. You have to consider memory and performance overhead, security, latency, etc.

[dukedougal]

That's fine, I can handle that, as long as Falcon has not already consumed the stream before I get a chance to read it..... :-)

[necaris]

This should be handled by #493

[kgriffs]

As of Falcon 1.0.0, the framework will no longer automatically parse, by default, requests that have the content type "application/x-www-form-urlencoded". This allows the app to consume the stream itself, if desired.

Alternatively, the automatic parsing can be enabled, but a custom subclass of Request could be used to define a new __init__() that reads env['wsgi.input'] and then replaces it with a BytesIO instance.

[kgriffs]

Combine with #471