Question

In a Django view you can access the request.GET['variablename'], so in your view you can do something like this:

myvar = request.GET['myvar']

The actual request.GET['myvar'] object type is:

<class 'django.http.QueryDict'>

Now, if you want to pass multiple variables with the same parameter name, i.e:

http://example.com/blah/?myvar=123&myvar=567

You would like a python list returned for the parameter myvar, then do something like this:

for var in request.GET['myvar']:
    print(var)

However, when you try that you only get the last value passed in the url i.e in the example above you will get 567, and the result in the shell will be:

5
6
7

However, when you do a print of request.GET it seems like it has a list i.e:

<QueryDict: {u'myvar': [u'123', u'567']}>

---

Ok Update:
It’s designed to return the last value, my use case is i need a list.

from django docs:

QueryDict.getitem(key)
Returns
the value for the given key. If the
key has more than one value,
getitem() returns the last value. Raises
django.utils.datastructures.MultiValueDictKeyError
if the key does not exist. (This is a
subclass of Python’s standard
KeyError, so you can stick to catching
KeyError

QueryDict.getlist(key) Returns the
data with the requested key, as a
Python list. Returns an empty list if
the key doesn’t exist. It’s guaranteed
to return a list of some sort.

Update:
If anyone knows why django dev’s have done this please let me know, seems counter-intuitive to show a list and it does not behave like one. Not very pythonic!

Answer 1

You want the getlist() function of the GET object:

request.GET.getlist('myvar')