Best way to get query string from a URL in python?

Question

I need to get the query string from this URL https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask?next=1&value=3 and I don’t want to use request.META. I have figured out that there are two more ways to get the query string:

Using urlparse
urlparse.urlparse(url).query
Using url encode
Use urlencode and pass the request.GET params dictionary into it to get the string representation.

So which way is better? My colleagues prefer urlencode but have not provided a satisfying explanation. They claim that urlparse calls urlencode internally which is something I’m not sure about since urlencode lives in the urllib module.

Asked By: NIlesh Sharma

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Source

Answer 1

Third option:

>>> from urlparse import urlparse, parse_qs
>>> url = 'http://something.com?blah=1&x=2'
>>> urlparse(url).query
'blah=1&x=2'
>>> parse_qs(urlparse(url).query)
{'blah': ['1'], 'x': ['2']}

In Python 3+ this is available as:

from urllib.parse import parse_qs

Documentation for urllib.parse

Answered By: Jon Clements

Answer 2

You can make Query string using GET parameters like this

request.GET.urlencode()

This does not include the ? prefix, and it may not return the keys in the same order as in the original request.

Answered By: Qasim Khan

Answer 3

I prefer using

request.META['QUERY_STRING']

From docs:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/ref/request-response/#django.http.HttpRequest.META

This does not include the ? prefix.

Answered By: mynameistechno

Best way to get query string from a URL in python?

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