Find a nice syntax to specify query parameters

[Kaligule]

Some sites rely heavily on query parameters. It would be cool if we could specify them in ob-http as easily as we can specify headers.

There is a similar open issue for restclient-mode: pashky/restclient.el#199

Curl already could do the encoding for us (as described in this article).
I belive adapting the parsing in ob-http would not be too hard (I am not great with elisp, but I think I could do that).

So I would like to know what syntax would be best to specify the parameters.
What does the community think?

Possible ideas

This is what I came up with in a short brainstorming.
I am sure there are better ideas out there, I am very open to suggestions.

Lets assume we try to do the following request:

#+begin_src http :pretty :wrap src json
GET https://api.duckduckgo.com/?q=simpsons+characters&format=json&pretty=true
#+end_src

like httpie

httpie uses == (instead of = to distinguish it from header paramers)
https://httpie.io/docs/cli/querystring-parameters

#+begin_src http :pretty :wrap src json
GET https://api.duckduckgo.com/
q==simpsons characters
format==json
pretty==true
#+end_src

like request.el

request.el uses the :param or :data parameter. In our case this would go in the header, but I am not sure how well this would look for ob-http and if we would have won anything by it. I think this is not worth it.
https://github.com/tkf/emacs-request

#+begin_src http :pretty :wrap src json :data q simpsons characters :data format json :data pretty true
GET https://api.duckduckgo.com/
#+end_src

have a keyword

or more of them.
This is currently my favorite.

Similar like the http verb we could have a keyword that marks query parameters. I am not so good with wording, I could imagine:

• PARAM
• DATA
• QUERYPARAM (a bit long perhaps)

#+begin_src http :pretty :wrap src json
GET https://api.duckduckgo.com/
PARAM q=simpsons characters
PARAM format-json
DATA pretty=true
#+end_src

[Kaligule]

I settled with a completely different solution: allowing to break long lines. This is implemented in #56

[ChanderG]

I still think that this is an important feature. Correct me if I am wrong, but #56 does not do out of the box url encoding, right? That is definitely needed in some cases.