Hide the text input field portion in a form's GET query url when the value is an empty string - html

Question

e.g.: http://127.0.0.1:8000/database/?reference_doi=&submit=Submit
I know It appears to be an html standard, but is there a tag to switch it, so that the empty text input string does not appear in the query url?
Or alternatively, since I'm using Django, I tried doing the following in my view.
request_get_copy = request.GET.copy()
for key, value in request_get_copy.items():
if not value or key == 'submit':
request_get_copy.pop(key)
request.GET = request_get_copy
request.META['QUERY_STRING'] = request_get_copy.urlencode()
I displayed request.GET and request.META['QUERY_STRING'] in the actual page through my template, and several methods that request object has, and they all gave successfully "corrected" values, like http://127.0.0.1:8000/database/ But since the GET request first goes through the browser, the displayed url still contains empty string value portions. Is there anything I can do?

Answer 1

The easiest thing you could do is to issue a redirect to your fixed URL:
fixed_url = request_get_copy.urlencode()
return redirect(fixed_url)
Even better if you do that only if it actually changed, and before any DB access or heavy work.
This means an additional GET, but gives you the result you want, and I guess that's more valuable to you :)
If Javascript is an option, you could also do this changes before the submit actually happens, it's a tad more convoluted but will avoid the extra request.
Edit: Just to be clear, there's no way to "turn it off", you could say this is how HTTP and browsers work :)