data = {
        'ids': [12, 3, 4, 5, 6 , ...]
    }
    urllib2.urlopen("http://abc.com/api/posts/create",urllib.urlencode(data))

I want to send a POST request, but one of the fields should be a list of numbers. How can I do that ? (JSON?)

If your server is expecting the POST request to be json, then you would need to add a header, and also serialize the data for your request…

Python 2.x

import json
import urllib2

data = {
        'ids': [12, 3, 4, 5, 6]
}

req = urllib2.Request('http://example.com/api/posts/create')
req.add_header('Content-Type', 'application/json')

response = urllib2.urlopen(req, json.dumps(data))

Python 3.x

https://stackoverflow.com/a/26876308/496445

If you don’t specify the header, it will be the default application/x-www-form-urlencoded type.

I recommend using the incredible requests module.

http://docs.python-requests.org/en/v0.10.7/user/quickstart/#custom-headers

url = 'https://api.github.com/some/endpoint'
payload = {'some': 'data'}
headers = {'content-type': 'application/json'}

response = requests.post(url, data=json.dumps(payload), headers=headers)

for python 3.4.2 I found the following will work:

import urllib.request
import json      

body = {'ids': [12, 14, 50]}  
myurl = "http://www.testmycode.com"

req = urllib.request.Request(myurl)
req.add_header('Content-Type', 'application/json; charset=utf-8')
jsondata = json.dumps(body)
jsondataasbytes = jsondata.encode('utf-8')   # needs to be bytes
req.add_header('Content-Length', len(jsondataasbytes))
response = urllib.request.urlopen(req, jsondataasbytes)

This works perfect for Python 3.5, if the URL contains Query String / Parameter value,

Request URL = https://bah2.com/ws/rest/v1/concept/
Parameter value = 21f6bb43-98a1-419d-8f0c-8133669e40ca

import requests

url = 'https://bahbah2.com/ws/rest/v1/concept/21f6bb43-98a1-419d-8f0c-8133669e40ca'
data = {"name": "Value"}
r = requests.post(url, auth=('username', 'password'), verify=False, json=data)
print(r.status_code)

You have to add header,or you will get http 400 error. The code works well on python2.6,centos5.4

code:

    import urllib2,json

    url = 'http://www.google.com/someservice'
    postdata = {'key':'value'}

    req = urllib2.Request(url)
    req.add_header('Content-Type','application/json')
    data = json.dumps(postdata)

    response = urllib2.urlopen(req,data)

Here is an example of how to use urllib.request object from Python standard library.

import urllib.request
import json
from pprint import pprint

url = "https://app.close.com/hackwithus/3d63efa04a08a9e0/"

values = {
    "first_name": "Vlad",
    "last_name": "Bezden",
    "urls": [
        "https://twitter.com/VladBezden",
        "https://github.com/vlad-bezden",
    ],
}


headers = {
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
    "Accept": "application/json",
}

data = json.dumps(values).encode("utf-8")
pprint(data)

try:
    req = urllib.request.Request(url, data, headers)
    with urllib.request.urlopen(req) as f:
        res = f.read()
    pprint(res.decode())
except Exception as e:
    pprint(e)

In the lastest requests package, you can use json parameter in requests.post() method to send a json dict, and the Content-Type in header will be set to application/json. There is no need to specify header explicitly.

import requests

payload = {'key': 'value'}

requests.post(url, json=payload)

This one works fine for me with apis

import requests

data={'Id':id ,'name': name}
r = requests.post( url = 'https://apiurllink', data = data)