# How to get both parsed body and raw body in Express

> Learn how to get both the parsed JSON body and the raw body in Express by adding a verify function to body-parser that saves the buffer to req.rawBody.

Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2019-10-29 | Topics: [Node.js](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/node/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/express-get-raw-body/

In one application I'm building, I had this problem.

Using Express, I can import `body-parser` to parse the body as [JSON](https://flaviocopes.com/json/):

```js
import bodyParser from 'body-parser'
```

```js
app.use(bodyParser.json())
```

However to integrate with the Stripe payments API I had the need to expose the **raw body** (not parsed) into an endpoint, and I couldn't figure out how to do it, while still parsing the body as JSON.

This did the trick:

```js
app.use(bodyParser.json({
  verify: (req, res, buf) => {
    req.rawBody = buf
  }
}))
```

Now the raw body is available on `req.rawBody` and the JSON parsed data is available on `req.body`.

From the `body-parser` [GitHub](https://flaviocopes.com/github/) I found that this doubles the RAM usage for every request, but since I need this functionality, I have no other way.

Except perhaps creating a different server just for the Stripe webhook I wanted to handle.