[Python-Dev] Should urlencode() sort the query parameters (if they come from a dict)? (original) (raw)

Joao S. O. Bueno jsbueno at python.org.br
Sat Aug 18 00:28:15 CEST 2012

On 17 August 2012 18:52, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 5:27 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

I just fixed a unittest for some code used at Google that was comparing a url generated by urllib.encode() to a fixed string. The problem was caused by turning on PYTHONHASHSEED=1. Because of this, the code under test would generate a textually different URL each time the test was run, but the intention of the test was just to check that all the query parameters were present and equal to the expected values.

query = sorted(query.items()) Hmm. ISTM this is putting priority on the unit test above the functionality of actual usage. Although on the other hand, sorting parameters on a URL is nothing compared to the cost of network traffic, so it's unlikely to be significant.

I don't think this behavior is only desirable to unit tests: having URL's been formed in predictable way a good thing in any way one thinks about it.

js -><-

Chris Angelico

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list