TestClient serialization of GET params with empty list as value

[code.djangoproject.com@…]

Problem:
When POST-ing a parameter whose value is the empty list, TestClient will strip that param-value pair out of the request entirely. In contrast to GET, which passes these along.

Expected behaviour:
They should work the same in the face of an empty list value.

See: ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/2268 for a patch making POST behave as GET.

[Aymeric Augustin]

As noted on the pull request, we may want to fix GET rather than POST.

In any case, they should behave similarly.

[Greg Chapple]

What is the desired behaviour here?

From what I can see, the difference lies with using django.utils.http.urlencode to process the get params.

>>> from django.utils.http import urlencode

>>> data = {'test': ['value1', 'value2']
>>> urlencode(data, doseq=True) 
'test=value1&test=value2'

>>> data = {'test': []}
>>> urlencode(data, doseq=True)
''

[Florian Apolloner]

From my gut I'd say that empty lists should get stripped out entirely, cause there is no way to represent an empty list, "?test=" would be interpreted as a list with one empty item in .getlist which makes no sense.

[Ahmad Abdallah]

What's the desired behavior here? If it's correcting getlist's handling of empty lists, isn't that more in line with altering QueryDict than changing serialization of GET params?

If we're still changing serialization, we might have to rewrite it ourselves since our current serialization is derived from urllib which is what causes the current bug mentioned by the ticket.