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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T08:44:33+00:00

It seems I can’t make this example print "You submitted nothing!". Every time I

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It seems I can’t make this example print "You submitted nothing!".
Every time I submit an empty form it says:

You submitted: u”

instead of:

You submitted nothing!

Where did I go wrong?

views.py

def search(request):
    if 'q' in request.GET:
        message = 'You submitted: %r' % request.GET['q']
    else:
        message = 'You submitted nothing!'

    return HttpResponse(message)

template:

<html>
    <head>
        <title> Search </title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <form action="/search/"  method="get" >
        <input type="text" name = "q">
        <input type="submit"value="Search"/>
        </form>
    </body>
</html>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Calling /search/ should result in “you submitted nothing”, but calling /search/?q= on the other hand should result in “you submitted u””

    Browsers have to add the q= even when it’s empty, because they have to include all fields which are part of the form. Only if you do some DOM manipulation in Javascript (or a custom javascript submit action), you might get such a behavior, but only if the user has javascript enabled. So you should probably simply test for non-empty strings, e.g:

    if request.GET.get('q'):
    message = 'You submitted: %r' % request.GET['q']
else:
    message = 'You submitted nothing!'
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