Sending bytes in query strings?

[jwodder]

Certain HTTP applications (like BitTorrent) require clients to send GET requests in which one or more query parameters are URL-encoded byte sequences, e.g., ?info_hash=%124Vx%9A%BC%DE%F1%23Eg%89%AB%CD%EF%124Vx%9A. Is there any way to send such requests with httpx? Trying to pass a bytes instance as a value in params results in the URL-encoding of the bytes' repr being used, and if the bytes is decoded with Latin-1, httpx will just re-encode it as UTF-8 before URL-encoding, which is wrong.

I am aware of issue #746, which currently says there are no plans to support bytes values in params, but I felt it was still worth asking if there was another way to accomplish what I need with this library.

[jwodder]

After some experimentation & debugging, I've found that it's possible to send bytes parameters through httpx if you do all of the URL-encoding and -construction manually, e.g.:

from urllib.parse import quote
import httpx

BASE_URL = "..."
INFO_HASH = b"..."

url = f"{BASE_URL}?info_hash={quote(INFO_HASH)}"
async with httpx.AsyncClient() as client:
    r = await client.get(url)

Note that, if you try to also pass in a separate params dict to client.get() with this method, the URL will be decoded (largely into replacement characters) and re-encoded, ruining everything.

I'd still prefer it if httpx had built-in support for this, though.