Can I get the ACTUAL Send Request Body from IE F12 developer?

Question

Apologies in advance because this isn't a code question, but it's to do with code development -

When monitoring my traffic, specifically POST requests, using Internet Explorer's new version of the F12 developer tool, the request body is broken down in to its key/value pairs and set alphabetically.

For my purposes this is completely rubbish.

It used to just show the ACTUAL request body - is there any way I can revert F12 developer to show this?!

I can't find any documentation on this and searches to do with this yield thousands of results which all seem irrelevant.

Answer 1

If your POST request is application/x-www-form-urlencoded you can only see it as key/value pairs in F12, even if you export it to a HAR file it will be encoded as key value pairs.

In general if you want to see the actual network traffic it's better to use a tool like Fiddler, netmon, or wireshark. The browser tools don't operate at the network layer and might be abstracted away from what actually gets sent. For example the browser tools don't know about the ordering of headers because the stack beneath it (wininet) doesn't keep that information only the parsed key / value pairs.