Node js + Express 4 parsing JSON POST request

Question

Having a problem with something that should be relatively simple. I am sending a POST request with JSON DATA as follows :

curl -H "Content-Type : application/json" -X POST -d '{"searchbar":"cat"}' http://someurl.com/public/search

Within my application I have a route ... under '/routes' I have set the bodyParser as follows:

router.use(bodyParser.json());
router.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }));

In the route I have var searchbar = req.body.searchbar

However the variable searchbar is always undefined.

I can see the data in the body as follows:

{ '{searchbar:cat}': '' }

Obviously the data is either not being sent correctly by the curl (so my curl is incorrect) or the data is not being parsed by the bodyParser. Can anyone help ?

EDIT : routes/index.js

var express = require('express');
var bodyParser = require('body-parser');
var moment = require('moment');
var fs = require('fs');
var router = express.Router();

router.use(bodyParser.json());
router.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }));

router.all('*',function(req,res,next) {
    res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*");
    res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Cache-Control, Pragma, Origin, Authorization, Content-Type, X-Requested-With");
    res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Methods", "GET, PUT, POST, OPTIONS");
    next();

});


router.post('/public/search/',  function (req, res) {
    res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*");
    res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Cache-Control, Pragma, Origin, Authorization, Content-Type, X-Requested-With");
    res.header("Access-Control-Allow-Methods", "GET, PUT, POST, OPTIONS");

    var searchbar = req.body.searchbar;
    console.log("Searchbar is : " + searchbar);
    console.log("body is : " + require('util').inspect(req.body, false, null)); 
    });

modeul.exports = router;

UPDATE:

I used postman (chrome plugin) and managed to send and parse the data - there must be an issue with CURL in this instance ...

Answer 1

Have the data inside quotes as follows:

curl -H "Content-Type : application/json" -X POST -d '{"searchbar":"cat"}' http://someurl.com/public/search

In your case its not json its s string , so its undefined.

EDIT:

Instead of this:

router.use(bodyParser.json());

Try for this:

router.use(express.bodyParser());

Answer 2

I finally solved this "mystery"

 curl -v -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Content-type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"searchbar":"cats"}'  http://someurl/public/search

Both the Accept and Content-Type headers were needed