Why copy data to Django instead of working directly with it?

Question

Django code examples that include post data often show code like this:

if request.method == "POST": post = request.POST.copy() #do stuff with post data 

Is there a reason for copying message data instead of working directly with it?

Answer 1

I think this is because request.POST itself is defined unchanged. If you want a version that you can really change (volatility), you need a copy of the data to work.

See this link (request.POST is an instance of QueryDict).

---

class QueryDict

QueryDict instances are immutable unless you create copy() from them. This means that you cannot directly modify the request.POST and request.GET attributes.