How are POST and GET variables handled in Python?

I've found nosklo's answer very extensive and useful! For those, like myself, who might find accessing the raw request data directly also useful, I would like to add the way to do that:

import os, sys

# the query string, which contains the raw GET data
# (For example, for http://example.com/myscript.py?a=b&c=d&e
# this is "a=b&c=d&e")
os.getenv("QUERY_STRING")

# the raw POST data
sys.stdin.read()

They are stored in the CGI fieldstorage object.

import cgi
form = cgi.FieldStorage()

print "The user entered %s" % form.getvalue("uservalue")

I know this is an old question. Yet it's surprising that no good answer was given.

First of all the question is completely valid without mentioning the framework. The CONTEXT is a PHP language equivalence. Although there are many ways to get the query string parameters in Python, the framework variables are just conveniently populated. In PHP, $_GET and $_POST are also convenience variables. They are parsed from QUERY_URI and php://input respectively.

In Python, these functions would be os.getenv('QUERY_STRING') and sys.stdin.read(). Remember to import os and sys modules.

We have to be careful with the word "CGI" here, especially when talking about two languages and their commonalities when interfacing with a web server. 1. CGI, as a protocol, defines the data transport mechanism in the HTTP protocol. 2. Python can be configured to run as a CGI-script in Apache. 3. The CGI module in Python offers some convenience functions.

Since the HTTP protocol is language-independent, and that Apache's CGI extension is also language-independent, getting the GET and POST parameters should bear only syntax differences across languages.

Here's the Python routine to populate a GET dictionary:

GET={}
args=os.getenv("QUERY_STRING").split('&')

for arg in args: 
    t=arg.split('=')
    if len(t)>1: k,v=arg.split('='); GET[k]=v

and for POST:

POST={}
args=sys.stdin.read().split('&')

for arg in args: 
    t=arg.split('=')
    if len(t)>1: k, v=arg.split('='); POST[k]=v

You can now access the fields as following:

print GET.get('user_id')
print POST.get('user_name')

I must also point out that the CGI module doesn't work well. Consider this HTTP request:

POST / test.py?user_id=6

user_name=Bob&age=30

Using CGI.FieldStorage().getvalue('user_id') will cause a null pointer exception because the module blindly checks the POST data, ignoring the fact that a POST request can carry GET parameters too.

suppose you're posting a html form with this:

<input type="text" name="username">

If using raw cgi:

import cgi
form = cgi.FieldStorage()
print form["username"]

If using Django, Pylons, Flask or Pyramid:

print request.GET['username'] # for GET form method
print request.POST['username'] # for POST form method

Using Turbogears, Cherrypy:

from cherrypy import request
print request.params['username']

Web.py:

form = web.input()
print form.username

Werkzeug:

print request.form['username']

If using Cherrypy or Turbogears, you can also define your handler function taking a parameter directly:

def index(self, username):
    print username

Google App Engine:

class SomeHandler(webapp2.RequestHandler):
    def post(self):
        name = self.request.get('username') # this will get the value from the field named username
        self.response.write(name) # this will write on the document

So you really will have to choose one of those frameworks.