title: Getting Flask Request Data
body: <p>Bit of a noob with Flask, sorry.</p>
  
  <p>My application is collecting the value from a drop down then POSTing that string to my flask function. I can (sort of) get at the data by using:</p>
  
  <pre><code>@app.route("/lookupmember", methods=["POST"])
  def lookupmember():
      member = request.data
      print(member)
      return member
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Interestingly though when I print the value of "member" out there in the python function I see something like:</p>
  
  <p><code>127.0.0.1 - - [19/Oct/2018 18:15:31] "POST /lookupmember HTTP/1.1" 200 -
  b'john doe'</code></p>
  
  <p>Whats the <code>b'</code> before the name <code>'john doe'</code>?</p>
  
  <p>When I console.log the same value after passing it back in the Ajax caller only the name is printed in the browser console. </p>
  
  <p>I reckon the b' part might be a key or identifier applied by flask? If so, it seems reasonable that there would be a way to use that to parse to get to just the name?</p>