Get request body as string in Django

I believe that the other end from where you receive this request does not convert the data to JSON before sending the request. Either you have to convert the data to JSON before you send, or just try accessing request.body in your view.

The request body, request.body, is a byte string. In Python 3.0 to 3.5.x, json.loads() will only accept a unicode string, so you must decode request.body before passing it to json.loads().

body_unicode = request.body.decode('utf-8')
body_data = json.loads(body_unicode)

In Python 2, json.loads will accept a unicode string or a byte sting, so the decode step is not necessary.

When decoding the string, I think you're safe to assume 'utf-8' - I can't find a definitive source for this, but see the quote below from the jQuery docs:

Note: The W3C XMLHttpRequest specification dictates that the charset is always UTF-8; specifying another charset will not force the browser to change the encoding.

In Python 3.6, json.loads() accepts bytes or bytearrays. Therefore you shouldn't need to decode request.body (assuming it's encoded in UTF-8).