Postman Chrome What is the difference between form-data x-www-form-urlencoded and raw

Question

I am using the Postman Chrome extension for testing a web service   There are three options available for data input   I guess the raw is for sending JSON   What is the difference between the other two  form-data and x-www-form-urlencoded

User · Answer

multipart form-data    Note  Please consult RFC2388 for additional information about file uploads  including backwards compatibility issues  the relationship between  multipart form-data  and other content types  performance issues  etc   Please consult the appendix for information about security issues for forms   The content type  application x-www-form-urlencoded  is inefficient for sending large quantities of binary data or text containing non-ASCII characters  The content type  multipart form-data  should be used for submitting forms that contain files  non-ASCII data  and binary data   The content type  multipart form-data  follows the rules of all multipart MIME data streams as outlined in RFC2045  The definition of  multipart form-data  is available at the  IANA  registry   A  multipart form-data  message contains a series of parts  each representing a successful control  The parts are sent to the processing agent in the same order the corresponding controls appear in the document stream  Part boundaries should not occur in any of the data  how this is done lies outside the scope of this specification   As with all multipart MIME types  each part has an optional  Content-Type  header that defaults to  text plain   User agents should supply the  Content-Type  header  accompanied by a  charset  parameter   application x-www-form-urlencoded    This is the default content type  Forms submitted with this content type must be encoded as follows   Control names and values are escaped  Space characters are replaced by     and then reserved characters are escaped as described in  RFC1738   section 2 2  Non-alphanumeric characters are replaced by HH   a percent sign and two hexadecimal digits representing the ASCII code of the character  Line breaks are represented as  CR LF  pairs  i e    0D 0A    The control names values are listed in the order they appear in the document  The name is separated from the value by   and name value pairs are separated from each other by   amp     application x-www-form-urlencoded the body of the HTTP message sent to the server is essentially one giant query string -- name value pairs are separated by the ampersand   amp    and names are separated from values by the equals symbol      An example of this would be    MyVariableOne ValueOne amp MyVariableTwo ValueTwo   The content type  application x-www-form-urlencoded  is inefficient for sending large quantities of binary data or text containing non-ASCII characters  The content type  multipart form-data  should be used for submitting forms that contain files  non-ASCII data  and binary data

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This explains better  Postman docs     Request body      While constructing requests  you would be dealing with the request body editor a lot  Postman lets you send almost any kind of HTTP request  If you can t send something  let us know    The body editor is divided into 4 areas and has different controls depending on the body type       form-data      multipart form-data is the default encoding a web form uses to transfer data  This simulates filling a form on a website  and submitting it  The form-data editor lets you set key value pairs  using the key-value editor  for your data  You can attach files to a key as well  Do note that due to restrictions of the HTML5 spec  files are not stored in history or collections  You would have to select the file again at the time of sending a request       urlencoded      This encoding is the same as the one used in URL parameters  You just need to enter key value pairs and Postman will encode the keys and values properly  Note that you can not upload files through this encoding mode  There might be some confusion between form-data and urlencoded so make sure to check with your API first       raw      A raw request can contain anything  Postman doesn t touch the string entered in the raw editor except replacing environment variables  Whatever you put in the text area gets sent with the request  The raw editor lets you set the formatting type along with the correct header that you should send with the raw body  You can set the Content-Type header manually as well  Normally  you would be sending XML or JSON data here       binary      binary data allows you to send things which you can not enter in Postman  For example  image  audio or video files  You can send text files as well  As mentioned earlier in the form-data section  you would have to reattach a file if you are loading a request through the history or the collection    UPDATE  As pointed out by VKK  the WHATWG spec say urlencoded is the default encoding type for forms      The invalid value default for these attributes is the application x-www-form-urlencoded state  The missing value default for the enctype attribute is also the application x-www-form-urlencoded state

User · Answer

These are different Form content types defined by W3C  If you want to send simple text  ASCII data  then x-www-form-urlencoded will work  This is the default   But if you have to send non-ASCII text or large binary data  the form-data is for that   You can use Raw if you want to send plain text or JSON or any other kind of string  Like the name suggests  Postman sends your raw string data as it is without modifications  The type of data that you are sending can be set by using the content-type header from the drop down   Binary can be used when you want to attach non-textual data to the request  e g  a video audio file  images  or any other binary data file   Refer to this link for further reading  Forms in HTML documents

User · Answer

Here are some supplemental examples to see the raw text that Postman passes in the request  You can see this by opening the Postman console     form-data  Header  content-type  multipart form-data  boundary --------------------------590299136414163472038474   Body  key1 value1key2 value2   x-www-form-urlencoded  Header  Content-Type  application x-www-form-urlencoded   Body  key1 value1 amp key2 value2   Raw text plain  Header  Content-Type  text plain   Body  This is some text    Raw json  Header  Content-Type  application json   Body    key1   value1   key2   value2

[forms] Postman Chrome: What is the difference between form-data, x-www-form-urlencoded and raw

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