# Consuming the request body

Requests can come with a body, for example for a POST request the body can include form encoded data from a webpage or JSON encoded data from a client. The body is sent after the request line and headers for both HTTP/1 and HTTP/2. This allows Quart to trigger the app’s request handling code before the full body has been received. Additionally the requester can choose to stream the request body, especially if the body is large as is often the case when sending files.

Quart follows Flask and provides methods to await the entire body before continuing,

    @app.route('/', methods=['POST'])
    async def index():
        await request.get_data()

## Advanced usage

You may wish to completely control how the request body is consumed, most likely to consume the data as it is received. To do this quart provides methods to iterate over the body,

    from async_timeout import timeout

    @app.route('/', methods=['POST'])
    async def index():
        async with timeout(app.config['BODY_TIMEOUT']):
            async for data in request.body:
                ...

Note

The above snippet uses Async-Timeout to ensure the body is received within the timeout specified.

Warning

Whilst the other request methods and attributes for accessing the body will timeout if the client takes to long send the request. Usage of `body` will not and it is up to you to wrap usage in a timeout.

Warning

Iterating over the body consumes the data, so any further usage of the data is not possible unless it is saved during the iteration.

## Testing

To test that a route consumes the body iteratively you will need to use the `request()` method,

    async def test_stream() -> None:
        test_client = app.test_client()
        async with test_client.request(...) as connection:
            await connection.send(b"data")
            await connection.send_complete()
        response = await connection.as_response()
        assert response ...

it also makes sense to check the code cleans up as you expect if the client disconnects whilst the request body is being sent,

    async def test_stream_closed() -> None:
        test_client = app.test_client()
        async with test_client.request(...) as connection:
            await connection.send(b"partial")
            await connection.disconnect()
        # Check cleanup markers....