express.text([options])

This is a built-in middleware function in Express. It parses incoming request payloads into a string and is based on body-parser.

Returns middleware that parses all bodies as a string and only looks at requests where the Content-Type header matches the type option. This parser accepts any Unicode encoding of the body and supports automatic inflation of gzip and deflate encodings.

A new body string containing the parsed data is populated on the request object after the middleware (i.e. req.body), or undefined if there was no body to parse, the Content-Type was not matched, or an error occurred.

As `req.body`'s shape is based on user-controlled input, all properties and values in this object are untrusted and should be validated before trusting. For example, `req.body.trim()` may fail in multiple ways, for example stacking multiple parsers `req.body` may be from a different parser. Testing that `req.body` is a string before calling string methods is recommended.

The following table describes the properties of the optional options object.

PropertyDescriptionTypeDefault
defaultCharsetSpecify the default character set for the text content if the charset is not specified in the Content-Type header of the request.String"utf-8"
inflateEnables or disables handling deflated (compressed) bodies; when disabled, deflated bodies are rejected.Booleantrue
limitControls the maximum request body size. If this is a number, then the value specifies the number of bytes; if it is a string, the value is passed to the bytes library for parsing.Mixed"100kb"
typeThis is used to determine what media type the middleware will parse. This option can be a string, array of strings, or a function. If not a function, type option is passed directly to the type-is library and this can be an extension name (like txt), a mime type (like text/plain), or a mime type with a wildcard (like */* or text/*). If a function, the type option is called as fn(req) and the request is parsed if it returns a truthy value.Mixed"text/plain"
verifyThis option, if supplied, is called as verify(req, res, buf, encoding), where buf is a Buffer of the raw request body and encoding is the encoding of the request. The parsing can be aborted by throwing an error.Functionundefined