How to send a “multipart/form-data” with requests in python?

Question

Basically, if you specify a files parameter (a dictionary), then requests will send a multipart/form-data POST instead of a application/x-www-form-urlencoded POST. You are not limited to using actual files in that dictionary, however:

>>> import requests
>>> response = requests.post('http://httpbin.org/post', files=dict(foo='bar'))
>>> response.status_code
200

and httpbin.org lets you know what headers you posted with; in response.json() we have:

>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> pprint(response.json()['headers'])
{'Accept': '*/*',
 'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate',
 'Connection': 'close',
 'Content-Length': '141',
 'Content-Type': 'multipart/form-data; '
                 'boundary=c7cbfdd911b4e720f1dd8f479c50bc7f',
 'Host': 'httpbin.org',
 'User-Agent': 'python-requests/2.21.0'}

Better still, you can further control the filename, content type and additional headers for each part by using a tuple instead of a single string or bytes object. The tuple is expected to contain between 2 and 4 elements; the filename, the content, optionally a content type, and an optional dictionary of further headers.

I’d use the tuple form with None as the filename, so that the filename="..." parameter is dropped from the request for those parts:

>>> files = {'foo': 'bar'}
>>> print(requests.Request('POST', 'http://httpbin.org/post', files=files).prepare().body.decode('utf8'))
--bb3f05a247b43eede27a124ef8b968c5
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="foo"; filename="foo"

bar
--bb3f05a247b43eede27a124ef8b968c5--
>>> files = {'foo': (None, 'bar')}
>>> print(requests.Request('POST', 'http://httpbin.org/post', files=files).prepare().body.decode('utf8'))
--d5ca8c90a869c5ae31f70fa3ddb23c76
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="foo"

bar
--d5ca8c90a869c5ae31f70fa3ddb23c76--

files can also be a list of two-value tuples, if you need ordering and/or multiple fields with the same name:

requests.post(
    'http://requestb.in/xucj9exu',
    files=(
        ('foo', (None, 'bar')),
        ('foo', (None, 'baz')),
        ('spam', (None, 'eggs')),
    )
)

If you specify both files and data, then it depends on the value of data what will be used to create the POST body. If data is a string, only it willl be used; otherwise both data and files are used, with the elements in data listed first.

There is also the excellent requests-toolbelt project, which includes advanced Multipart support. It takes field definitions in the same format as the files parameter, but unlike requests, it defaults to not setting a filename parameter. In addition, it can stream the request from open file objects, where requests will first construct the request body in memory:

from requests_toolbelt.multipart.encoder import MultipartEncoder

mp_encoder = MultipartEncoder(
    fields={
        'foo': 'bar',
        # plain file object, no filename or mime type produces a
        # Content-Disposition header with just the part name
        'spam': ('spam.txt', open('spam.txt', 'rb'), 'text/plain'),
    }
)
r = requests.post(
    'http://httpbin.org/post',
    data=mp_encoder,  # The MultipartEncoder is posted as data, don't use files=...!
    # The MultipartEncoder provides the content-type header with the boundary:
    headers={'Content-Type': mp_encoder.content_type}
)

Fields follow the same conventions; use a tuple with between 2 and 4 elements to add a filename, part mime-type or extra headers. Unlike the files parameter, no attempt is made to find a default filename value if you don’t use a tuple.

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