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Python

Frederick Pearce
Frederick Pearce
10,677 Points
Posted by Frederick Pearce
Frederick Pearce
10,677 Points

What does request.args.get return?

This is a comment, not a question, regarding one of the quiz questions in Flask basics. It's a good guess just from carefully reading the question that "query strings" probably return strings, but I didn't pick up on this right away, so wrote a simple test I thought I would share that proves this point:

from flask import Flask
from flask import request

app = Flask(__name__)


@app.route('/')
def index(name=""):
   # for example, try ?name=1.0
    name = request.args.get('name', name)
    return "You entered a query string of {}, and request.args.get returned it as a {}, of course!".format(n    ame, type(name).__name__)

app.run(debug=True)
Daniel Santos
Daniel Santos
34,969 Points

What was the output?

1 Answer

Daniel Santos
Daniel Santos
34,969 Points

I did some research and I learned that .get() is a method of the dict class. So as any dictionaries behavior, if you do:

my_dict = {'Name': 'Daniel',  'Age': 22}
name = my_dict.get('Name')
age = my_dict.get('Age')

name will be the same datatype as the data in the dictionary. I don't know if this make sense. For example, name will be a string type and age will be a integer type. I made this example using the python3 shell.

>>> dict = {'Name': 'Zara', 'Age': 27}
>>> dict.get('Name')
'Zara'
>>> dict.get('Age')
27
>>> response = dict.get('Age')
>>> response_two = dict.get('Name')
>>> response.type()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute 'type'
>>> type(response).__name__
'int'
>>> type(response_two).__name__
'str'

That was my research, and now to respond your question. request.args.get() will always return a string. And the reason is, it has been stored as a string. Does this make any sense for you?

For example, you have this query string. http://www.mysite.com/?name=Frederick&language=Python&version=3

If you do 

type(request.args.get('name')).__name__
# This will be a string.
type(request.args.get('version')).__name__
#This also will be a string

In addition, you can always cast this data types. 

# String to int
# Assuming that the string are numbers
string = '34'
to_num = int(string)

# Int to string
num = 34
to_string = str(num)

I hope this help, -Dan