Getting POST data in an HTTP server ...

My goal is to write a script that sets up an HTTP server and when I post data in from a client, I want to see that data within Espruino. To that end, I set up the following script:

var wifi = require("Wifi");
var esp8266 = require("ESP8266");
var http = require("http");
wifi.startAP("ESP8266", {
  "authMode": "open"
}, function(err) {
  var httpServer = http.createServer(function(request, response) {
    console.log("Received a server request!" + JSON.stringify(request));
    if (request.available() === 0) {
      console.log("No data");
    } else {
      var receivedData = request.read();
      console.log("Data = " + receivedData);
    }
    response.write("Response data!");
    response.end();
  });
  httpServer.listen(80);
});

I then send in a POST request using:

wget http://192.168.4.1/hello  --post-data="hello" --quiet --output-document=-

when the request is received by the ESP8266, the message logged is:

Received a server request!{"type":1,"res":{},"svr":{"type"­:1,"port":80,"sckt":9},"sckt":10,"header­s":{"User-Agent":"Wget/1.16 (linux-gnueabihf)","Accept":"*/*","Host"­:"192.168.4.1","Connection":"Keep-Alive"­,"Content-Type":"application/x-www-form-­urlencoded","Content-Length":"5"},"metho­d":"POST","url":"/hello","hdrs":true,"dR­cv":""}
No data

From this note two things. The first is that the amount of available bytes is flagged as 0 while the HTTP header says that 5 bytes (what I would expect) was sent.

If I change the code to include:

request.on("data", function(data) {
   console.log(data);
});

I do in fact see the data. What is puzzling me is the notion that I had expected available() to return 5 for the amount of payload data and response.read() to be able to read that data. Can anyone spot what I might have mis understood?