JWT is being converted from str to bytes on requests.post() - json

Question

I am writing a Flask application in which I have a service that generates a JWT and passes this onto another service using requests.post(), after decoding it to 'UTF-8'.
While sending the JWT, I can see that the type is 'str'. However, on performing a json.loads() on the other service, I get an error that says
TypeError: the JSON object must be str, not 'bytes'
Here is my code:
Service 1:
#app.route('/')
def index():
token = jwt.encode({'message': 'Hello'}, app.config['SECRET_KEY'])
# After this statement I am able to verify the type is str and not bytes
token = token.decode('UTF-8')
headers = {'content-type': 'application/json'}
url = 'someUrl'
data = {"token": token}
data = json.dumps(data)
requests.post(url, data=data, headers=headers)
return 'Success'
Service 2:
#app.route('/', methods=['POST'])
def index():
data = json.loads(request.data)
return 'Success'
Why do I get this error even though the type was converted to string ?
EDIT: I was able to successfully retrieve the token by passing it through header. But I would still like to know what caused this error.

Answer 1

You could post it as JSON instead of data, and let the underlying library take care of it for you.
Service 1
#app.route('/')
def index():
token = jwt.encode({'message': 'Hello'}, app.config['SECRET_KEY']).decode('UTF-8')
url = 'someUrl'
data = {"token": token}
requests.post(url, json=data)
return 'Success'
Service 2
data = request.get_json()