url quoting required for json body?

[Eric Rasmussen]

Hi,

I'm trying to figure out how you parse json requests. It looks like when I POST requests the headers are ignored (content-type: application/json), and the json body is unquoted prior to parsing. Is this a safe assumption?

As an example, if my request body is a json object along the lines of:
    { "id":"my list id","email_address":"special+...@example.com"}

It should first be url quoted as:
    %7B%22id%22%3A%22mylistid%22%2C%22email_address%22%3A%22special%2Bcharacter%40example.com%22%7D

You would then unquote the body, parse the json, and proceed. Correct?

The puzzling part is that except for the "+" character, quoting seems to have no bearing on how you parse the response. I can't imagine what it's doing on your side such that quoting is optional for some characters and not others, and any clarification would be much appreciated.

Thank you!
Eric

[jesse]

Quoting is a misnomer here - it looks like you're doing html character encoding, not urlencoding. Take a look at example #2 here:
http://apidocs.mailchimp.com/api/1.3/listsubscribe.func.php

jesse

[Eric Rasmussen]

Thanks. The php urlencode function seems to behave similarly to the python urllib.quote function. But regardless of whether we call it quoting, escaping, or encoding, as long as I understand it's required I can move forward.

For the record though I still don't understand *why* it's required. In that example you linked me to there should be no reason to call urlencode() on the json body. The application/json content-type header exists so the server can decode it as json, not decode the body separately as url encoded and then decode json. I've worked with a number of major APIs before and this is the first time I've ever seen the json body treated this way.