Vfrdtyky

I need to do a API call to upload a file along with a JSON string with details about the file.

I am trying to use the python requests lib to do this:

import requests



info = {

    'var1' : 'this',

    'var2'  : 'that',

}



data = json.dumps({

    'token' : auth_token,

    'info'  : info,

})



headers = {'Content-type': 'multipart/form-data'}



files = {'document': open('file_name.pdf', 'rb')}



r = requests.post(url, files=files, data=data, headers=headers)

This throws the following error:

    raise ValueError("Data must not be a string.")

 ValueError: Data must not be a string

If I remove the 'files' from the request, it works.

If I remove the 'data' from the request, it works.

If I do not encode data as JSON it works.

For this reason I think the error is to do with sending JSON data and files in the same request.

Any ideas on how to get this working?

Don't encode using json.

import requests



info = {

    'var1' : 'this',

    'var2'  : 'that',

}



data = {

    'token' : auth_token,

    'info'  : info,

}



headers = {'Content-type': 'multipart/form-data'}



files = {'document': open('file_name.pdf', 'rb')}



r = requests.post(url, files=files, data=data, headers=headers)

Note that this may not necessarily be what you want, as it will become another form-data section.

See this thread How to send JSON as part of multipart POST-request

Do not set the Content-type header yourself, leave that to pyrequests to generate

def send_request():

payload = {"param_1": "value_1", "param_2": "value_2"}

files = {

     'json': (None, json.dumps(payload), 'application/json'),

     'file': (os.path.basename(file), open(file, 'rb'), 'application/octet-stream')

}



r = requests.post(url, files=files)

print(r.content)

I'm don't think you can send both data and files in a multipart encoded file, so you need to make your data a "file" too:

files = {

    'data' : data,

    'document': open('file_name.pdf', 'rb')

}



r = requests.post(url, files=files, headers=headers)

What is more:

files = {

    'document': open('file_name.pdf', 'rb')

}

That will only work if your file is at the same directory where your script is.

If you want to append file from different directory you should do:

files = {

    'document': open(os.path.join(dir_path, 'file_name.pdf'), 'rb')

}

Where dir_path is a directory with your 'file_name.pdf' file.

But what if you'd like to send multiple PDFs ?

You can simply make a custom function to return a list of files you need (in your case that can be only those with .pdf extension). That also includes files in subdirectories (search for files recursively):

def prepare_pdfs():

    return sorted([os.path.join(root, filename) for root, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(dir_path) for filename in filenames if filename.endswith('.pdf')])

Then you can call it:

my_data = prepare_pdfs()

And with simple loop:

for file in my_data:



    pdf = open(file, 'rb')



    files = {

        'document': pdf

    }



    r = requests.post(url, files=files, ...)

For sending Facebook Messenger API, I changed all the payload dictionary values to be strings. Then, I can pass the payload as data parameter.

import requests



ACCESS_TOKEN = ''



url = 'https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/me/messages'

payload = {

        'access_token' : ACCESS_TOKEN,

        'messaging_type' : "UPDATE",

        'recipient' : '{"id":"1111111111111"}',

        'message' : '{"attachment":{"type":"image", "payload":{"is_reusable":true}}}',

}

files = {'filedata': (file, open(file, 'rb'), 'image/png')}

r = requests.post(url, files=files, data=payload)