This repository hosts the query string parser for Python/Django projects that correctly creates nested dictionaries from sent form/querystring data.
Lets say you have some textfields on your webpage that you wish to get as dictionary on the backend. The querystring could look like: :: section[1]['words'][2]=a§ion[0]['words'][2]=a§ion[0]['words'][2]=b
Standard django REQUEST (QueryDict) variable will contain: :: <QueryDict: {u"section[1]['words'][2]": [u'a'], u"section[0]['words'][2]": [u'a', u'b']}>
As you see it doesn't really convert it to dict. Instead of elegant dictionary you have a string called "section[1]['words'][2]" and "section[0]['words'][2]" and if you want to do something with it, you'll need to parse it (sic!).
When using querystring-parser the output will look like: :: {u'section': {0: {u'words': {2: [u'a', u'b']}}, 1: {u'words': {2: u'a'}}}}
Tadam! Everything is much simpler and more beautiful now :)
Test made using timeit show that in most cases speed of created library is similar to standard Django QueryDict parsing speed. For query string containing multidimensional complicated arrays querystring-parser is significantly slower. This is totally understandable as created library creates nested dictionaries in contrary to standard Django function which only tokenizes data. You can see results below. Edit: Actually parsing is done by urlparse.parse_qs so I've added it to tests.
Test string nr querystring-parser Django QueryDict parse_qs
0 2.75077319145 3.44334220886 0.582501888275
Test string nr querystring-parser Django QueryDict parse_qs
1 10.1889920235 10.2983090878 2.08930182457
Test string nr querystring-parser Django QueryDict parse_qs
2 0.613747119904 1.21649289131 0.283004999161
Test string nr querystring-parser Django QueryDict parse_qs
3 0.107316017151 0.459388017654 0.0687718391418
Test string nr querystring-parser Django QueryDict parse_qs
4 0.00291299819946 0.169251918793 0.0170118808746
Test #1 Is most interesting as is contains nested dictionaries in query string.
Installation: ============
Install using pip. :: pip install querystring-parser
Just add it to your Django project and start using it. :: from querystring_parser import parser post_dict = parser.parse(request.POST.urlencode())
- MIT License