Pythons requests library removing appending question mark from URL

Question

Goal

Make request to http://example.com/page? using requests.get()

Problem

The question mark ("?") is automatically stripped from the request if it is the last character in the URL (eg. http://example.com/page?1 and http://example.com/page?! work, http://example.com/page? does not)

Sample code

import requests

endpoint = "http://example.com/page?"
r = requests.get(endpoint)

print(r.url) # -> "http://example.com/page"
assert r.url == endpoint # Raises AssertionError

Question

Without modifying the library, is it possible to reach the intended endpoint? Both intended solutions (if such exist) and workarounds are welcome.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is not possible with the requests library. URLs passed into requests are parsed by urllib3.util.url.parse_url() into separate parts:

scheme
auth
host
port
path
query
fragment

The logic for getting the query part of a URL assumes that the querystring starts after ?, but since there is nothing after the question mark, it gives a blank query. The URL is then reconstructed as a string when you print r.url. That is why the URL does not have the trailing question mark.

I found that the behavior you are looking for is possible with urllib.request, though. Here's an example:

import urllib.request, urllib.error

try:
    response = urllib.request.urlopen("http://example.com/page?") 
    print(response.url)  # -> http://example.com/page?
except urllib.error.HTTPError as e:
    print(e.url)  # -> http://example.com/page?
    print(e.code) # -> 404

I have surrounded the request in a try/except because if the page you are trying to get gives a 404, urllib will raise an error, where requests will simply put up with it.