clean-query-params

I often find myself needing to send URL's based on some kinds of an API call. If you are generating the URL through some kinds of API generator, you will most likely get a bunch of query parameters that you are not using. This is a common occurence when generating URL's for queries to ArcGIS Server.

You can see a very long example below, where only a few of the query paramters are actually being used.

http://navigator.state.or.us/arcgis/rest/services/Locators/gc_Composite/GeocodeServer/findAddressCandidates?Address=635+Capitol+St+NE&City=Salem&Zip=97301&State=OR&SingleLine=&category=&outFields=*&maxLocations=&outSR=4326&searchExtent=&location=&distance=&magicKey=&f=pjson

To clean this up, I usually manually delete the query parameters that have empty values. clean-query-params is a small command line utility written in Node.js to take a URL with unused query parameters, remove them, and stream the output to stdout.

Setup

npm install -g clean-query-params

Execution

clean-query-params "http://navigator.state.or.us/arcgis/rest/services/Locators/gc_Composite/GeocodeServer/findAddressCandidates?Address=635+Capitol+St+NE&City=Salem&Zip=97301&State=OR&SingleLine=&category=&outFields=*&maxLocations=&outSR=4326&searchExtent=&location=&distance=&magicKey=&f=pjson" > cleanurl.txt

Notice how I am writing the result to a file using > cleanurl.txt

Result

After running the script, you will see your slimmed down URL:

http://navigator.state.or.us/arcgis/rest/services/Locators/gc_Composite/GeocodeServer/findAddressCandidates?Address=2266%20Crestview%20Dr&City=Salem&Zip=97301&State=OR&outFields=*&outSR=4326&f=pjson