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I agree we should make this better since it violates the principle of least-surprise. Scheduled for 3.0 in case someone wants to tackle it right away, otherwise it will need to be pushed to 3.1.

FWIW, our media type negotiation machinery seems to automatically choose the application/json handler for requests sent as application-json; charset=UTF-8, even if an explicit handler for the latter is missing. In that light, could we just remove the explicit application-json; charset=UTF-8 handler from our codebase and the docs, now that we are defaulting to just application/json ourselves.

As a bonus, that would eliminate confusion in situations like @adsahay is describing.

I was testing the app below, and it seems to just work:

import falcon


class Resource:

    def on_post(self, req, resp):
        resp.media = req.get_media()


app = falcon.App()
app.req_options.media_handlers = falcon.media.Handlers({
    'application/json': falcon.media.JSONHandler(),
})
app.add_route('/mirror', Resource())

Thoughts?

Yes this sounds great.

Also, it might be a stylistic preference, but in such situations if we can have a constant for all handlers (falcon.MIME_JSON) or something it will have the additional benefit of discoverability of available handlers in documentation / code completion, and avoid typos.

If you want I can fix and send PR for this (my first falcon contribution!)

Hi again @adsahay ,
We do have such constants (the stable version already has), maybe we just haven't updated all the docs with them yet. Or, we may have left explicit strings in selected places for clarity.

>>> import falcon
>>> falcon.MEDIA_JSON
'application/json'
>>> falcon.MEDIA_PNG
'image/png'
>>> falcon.MEDIA_TEXT
'text/plain; charset=utf-8'

@adsahay PRs are always welcome 🙂 👍
To be honest, I haven't fully explored the ramifications of removing the explicit UTF-8 JSON handler, it's just a quick idea that crossed my head. But maybe we could start a draft PR anyway?

@kgriffs thoughts on my suggestion to simplify the default JSON handlers by only keeping the application/json handler?

It could be that the key including the charset was left in to speed up the selection algorithm... regardless, I agree that it is not worth maintaining it since in most cases the charset will not be present in the string to begin with.

@adsahay just checking, would you like to work on this by removing application-json; charset=UTF-8 from the default handlers?

As we proceed to remove it though, I would like to see a note added to the docs regarding speeding up the selection algorithm (needs to be verified with a benchmark!), as hinted by @kgriffs above. So that people could duplicate their handlers for a specific parameter set, if they expect that to be their common use case that needs to be optimized.

Ok sure.