Send data from a textbox into Flask?

Unless you want to do something more complicated, feeding data from a HTML form into Flask is pretty easy.

  • Create a view that accepts a POST request (my_form_post).
  • Access the form elements in the dictionary request.form.

templates/my-form.html:

<form method="POST">
    <input name="text">
    <input type="submit">
</form>
from flask import Flask, request, render_template

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def my_form():
    return render_template('my-form.html')

@app.route('/', methods=['POST'])
def my_form_post():
    text = request.form['text']
    processed_text = text.upper()
    return processed_text

This is the Flask documentation about accessing request data.

If you need more complicated forms that need validation then you can take a look at WTForms and how to integrate them with Flask.

Note: unless you have any other restrictions, you don't really need JavaScript at all to send your data (although you can use it).


All interaction between server(your flask app) and client(browser) going by request and response. When user hit button submit in your form his browser send request with this form to your server (flask app), and you can get content of the form like:

request.args.get('form_name')

Declare a Flask endpoint to accept POST input type and then do necessary steps. Use jQuery to post the data.

from flask import request

@app.route('/parse_data', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def parse_data(data):
    if request.method == "POST":
         #perform action here
var value = $('.textbox').val();
$.ajax({
  type: 'POST',
  url: "{{ url_for('parse_data') }}",
  data: JSON.stringify(value),
  contentType: 'application/json',
  success: function(data){
    // do something with the received data
  }
});

Tags:

Python

Flask