Introduction to body-parser in Node.js

What is body-parser?

body-parser is the Node.js body parsing middleware. Middleware are the functions that have access to the request object (req), the response object (res), and the next middleware function in the application’s request-response cycle.In Node body-parser  is used to parse the body of requests.

This provides the following parsers,

• JSON body parser
• Raw body parser
• Text body parser
• URL-encoded form body parser

body-parser does not handle multipart bodies. For this you will have to use some other like,

• busboy and connect-busboy
• multiparty and connect-multiparty
• formidable
• multer

Installation

You can install body-parser by using the following code in your command line.

npm install body-parser

And then you have to require it in your app.js file

Example:

var bodyParser = require('body-parser');

//To parse URL encoded data

app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: false })) 

//To parse json data

app.use(bodyParser.json())

To get to know more about body-parser visit github.