request.GET and request.POST are misleadingly named: - GET contains the URL parameters and is therefore available whatever the request method. This often confuses beginners and “returners” alike. - POST contains form data on POST requests, but not other kinds of data from POST requests. It can confuse users who are posting JSON or other formats.
Additionally both names can lead users to think e.g. "if request.GET:" means "if this is a GET request", which is not true. I believe the CAPITALIZED naming style was inherited from PHP's global variables $_GET, $_POST, $_FILES etc. ( https://www.php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.get.php ). It stands out as unpythonic, since these are instance variables and not module-level constants (as per PEP8 https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#constants ). I therefore propose these renames: - request.GET -> request.query_params (to match Django Rest Framework - see below) - request.POST -> request.form_data - request.FILES -> request.files - request.COOKIES -> request.cookies - request.META -> request.meta Since these are very core attributes and the change would cause a huge amount of churn, I propose not deprecating the old aliases immediately, but leaving them in with a documentation note that they "may be deprecated." Perhaps they can be like url() or ifequal which came up on the mailing list recently - put through the normal deprecation path after a few releases with such a note. Django Rest Framework already aliases GET as request.query_params in its request wrapper: https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/requests/#query_params . Therefore the name request.query_params should not be surprising. DRF also provides request.data which combines request.POST and request.FILES, and flexibly parses from different content types, but I'm not sure that's feasible to implement in Django core. For reference, other Python web frameworks have more "Pythonic" naming: - Bottle: request.url_args, request.forms, request.files, request.cookies, request.environ - Flask: request.args, request.form, request.files, request.cookies, request.environ - Starlette: request.query_params, request.form(), request.form()[field_name], request.cookies, scope One more note for those who might think such core attributes should be left alone: Django 2.2 added request.headers as a way of accessing headers by name. This is convenient as it avoids the need to transform the header to the WSGI environ name. makes the code more readable, and in the process reduces the potential for bugs. I believe this proposal is in the same vein. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/CAMyDDM3%2BUucViDezhkWrFsk6ZsKViWjOgtA5aBm9pnzozdc%2Beg%40mail.gmail.com.
