Incorrect parsing of complex JS nested objects in POST request about needle

[tomas]

Are you sure the server is returning the JSON data in the correct format? Needle simply does a JSON.parse on the response data so I'm not sure if Needle's the culprit in this one.

[yetzt]

looks to me like this happens when the post data is sent in querystring format (default). use { json: true } in your needle options to send the data as json.

i would refrain from using querystring format to transfer complex objects, because to my knowledge there is no consistant standard about how to encode and decode complex objects. see for yourself:

const qs = require("querystring");

const data = {
	field1: 'hello',
	field2: [
		'line1',
		'line2',
		'line3',
	],
	field3: [
	{
		subfield1: 'this is a string',
		subfield2: ['this is array'],
		subfield3: ['another array']
	},
	{
		subfield1: 'this is a string',
		subfield2: ['this is array'],
		subfield3: ['another array']
	},
	{
		subfield1: 'this is a string',
		subfield2: ['this is array'],
		subfield3: ['another array']
	},
	]
};

console.log(qs.decode(qs.encode(data)));

needle uses this method to encode the data, and the express.urlencoded middleware that ultimately parses the data comes from here.

[tomas]

Oh I see. I misunderstood then; I thought the problem was related the the decoding of JSON, not the encoding part. Ok I'll take a look in a while.

[tomas]

Ok, we can try and see whether adding the array item index this line makes it works like expected. The resulting encoded string would look like this (using your example data):

[yetzt]

maybe writing a test utilizing the body-parser middleware from express would be in order. keep in mind that this would fix it for one kind of backend, other backends like php might end up not parsing it in the same way.