id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	stage	has_patch	needs_docs	needs_tests	needs_better_patch	easy	ui_ux
18499	Malformed query string becomes part of request.path	mkai	nobody	"I've been seeing some requests from crawlers to URLs like this lately:

{{{
http://site.com/page/&a=y&b=y
}}}

DJango parses this into 

{{{ 
request.path == ""/page/&a=y&b=y""
request.META[""QUERY_STRING""] == """".
}}}

What I'd like to see is for e. g. CommonMiddleware to fix this malformed query string by replacing the first '&' with an '?'; so that 

{{{
request.path == '/page/' 
request.META[""QUERY_STRING""] == ""a=y&b=y"".
}}}

This caused some 404s for my site, so I made the following piece of middleware to work around it:

{{{
#!python
class MalformedQueryStringMiddleware(object):
    def process_request(self, request):
        if '&' in request.path:  # '&' left over from a malformed query string
            url = '%s&%s' % (request.path.replace('&', '?', 1),
                             request.META['QUERY_STRING'])
            return HttpResponsePermanentRedirect(url)

}}}

Do you think Django should do that by itself?"	Bug	closed	Core (URLs)	1.4	Normal	invalid	query string, query_string, malformed		Unreviewed	0	0	0	0	0	0