How do I send a POST request as a JSON?

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)

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

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