Parser return a array with empty string even if there is no value to the parameter

[ljharb]

Parser return a array with empty string even if there is no value to the parameter

[nlf]

Currently, that is the intended behavior, yes.

If there's a strong opinion to not have this behavior, I'm open to hearing it.

@dougwilson maybe you have some input here?

[dougwilson]

Because urlencoded is not as rich as JSON and things, it doesn't have a lot of different types. Everything is just a string, so nothing to the right of the equal sign is an empty string. If it were up to me, for the example above [] doesn't make sense at all. The best outcomes would be [''], [undefined], or [null], but all those are weird. Ideally you should be able to take come input and get str === qs.stringify(qs.parse(str)) (excluding encoding differences).

Looking at the results of qs.parse(qs.stringify(obj)), it seems [''] or [null] both fit the bill. I'm am not decided yet on which one seem better :)

[nlf]

Yeah, my instinct is to keep the empty string. It doesn't feel 100% right, but it's just as close to right as anything else I can think of.

[dougwilson]

Yep. The empty array may have been what the old qs did, but it feels wrong and I know it caused problems when people expected "name[]=first&name[]=&name[]=last" to return three elements because someone left middle blank in an input field.

[nlf]

Going to close this, I think the current behavior is the closest to appropriate we'll get.