Value less query params are not preserved exactly

[ulope]

This fails:

url = "http://host/?param"
assert str(furl(url)) == url

I have to talk to a very picky web-service that needs a specific parameter to have no value (and not an empty value). However Furl generates ?param= with an empty value. Maybe using None for no value would work?

[gruns]

A user's expectation of None would be ?param=, not ?param. The former is
more common. To be explicit

>>> f = furl('http://www.google.com/')
>>> f.args['sup'] = None
>>> f.url
'http://www.google.com/?sup='

instead of

>>> f = furl('http://www.google.com/')
>>> f.args['sup'] = None
>>> f.url
'http://www.google.com/?sup'

I can't recall the last time I saw the latter in the wild.

The current behavior serializes None to a string

>>> f = furl('http://www.google.com/')
>>> f.args['sup'] = None
>>> f.url
'http://www.google.com/?sup=None'

But I agree: None would be useful as a special value.

I'll ruminate on a potential solution for ?param. None as such would break a
lot of people's expectations.

Do you have any other ideas?

[nvie]

Why not ?sup for sup = None and ?sup= for sup = ''?

[ulope]

Why not ?sup for sup = None and ?sup= for sup = ''?

Yes, thats how I meant it.

@gruns:
You wrote yourself that None currently isn't producing a very useful result - so I think there has to be no concern regarding backwards compatibility.

[gruns]

Why not ?sup for sup = None and ?sup= for sup = ''?

That's how I understood @ulope.

The problem is the aforementioned breaks user expectations. ?sup=
is much more common than ?sup, so a new user would expect f.args['sup'] = None to become ?sup=, not ?sup.

That said, I don't see an obviously better way of supporting ?sup. Ruling out
the above, a furl constant could be used, like subprocess.PIPE

>>> f = furl('http://www.google.com/')
>>> f.args['sup'] = furl.EMPTY
>>> f.url
'http://www.google.com/?sup'

But that's mediocre at best.

Any other ideas before I implement f.args['sup'] = None as ?sup and f.args['sup'] = '' as ?sup=?

[gruns]

Support for query parameters without a trailing =, as discussed above, was added to furl v0.3.6.

>>> f = furl('http://sprop.su')
>>> f.args['param'] = None
>>> f.url
'http://sprop.su/?param'

Upgrade with

pip install furl --upgrade

Thank you for bringing this issue to my attention @ulope.

[nvie]

👍