If you are making an HTTP(S) post request via NodeJS, and have non-English text (Hindi, Japanese, or any other script) in the post body, chances are that your requests are failing. I encountered this in one of my recent projects where I was sending Hindi text in the post body. The root cause was that the value sent in the ‘content-length’ header was incorrect.
The post body was in JSON format. My request was looking something like this:
const https = require('https');
const postdata = JSON.stringify({
first_name: 'यश',
last_name: 'संघवी'
});
console.log("Postdata length: " + postdata.length.toString());
const options = {
hostname: 'example.com',
port: 443,
path: '/example_path',
method: 'POST',
headers: {
'Content-Type': 'application/json',
'Content-Length': postdata.length,
},
};
const req = https.request(options, res => {
console.log(`statusCode: ${res.statusCode}`);
res.on('data', d => {
process.stdout.write(d);
});
});
req.on('error', error => {
console.error(error);
});
req.write(postdata);
req.end();
If you run the above code, you’ll see that the postdata length is 39. However, if I sent the same request via Postman, and observed the logs in the Postman console, the content-length gets printed as 53.
So what’s going on? Well, the answer is that when you have non-English text, or even if you have English text, it is better to count the length of the utf-8 encoded text. This way, you’ll get the actual number of bytes. Non-English characters may take up more than one byte, and a simple .length() operation on a string won’t reveal that. Here’s the right way to make this request:
const https = require('https');
const utf8 = require('utf8');
const postdata = JSON.stringify({
first_name: 'यश',
last_name: 'संघवी'
});
let content = utf8.encode(postdata);
console.log("Postdata length: " + content.length.toString());
const options = {
hostname: 'example.com',
port: 443,
path: '/example_path',
method: 'POST',
headers: {
'Content-Type': 'application/json',
'Content-Length': content.length,
},
};
const req = https.request(options, res => {
console.log(`statusCode: ${res.statusCode}`);
res.on('data', d => {
process.stdout.write(d);
});
});
req.on('error', error => {
console.error(error);
});
req.write(postdata);
req.end();
Now, the length of the utf8 encoded data is 53, as expected. This request will go through (provided that the host and path are correct).
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