Squishes white space, reduces doubled slashes and removes the query string,
so that the same page reached by two spellings of its address counts once
(ECB links carry a cache-busting hash after ?).
Details
Use it to compare addresses and to derive identifiers from them, not to
request a page: a query string can be what selects the document. Identifiers
of central_bank_database are hashes of these strings, so changing what
this function returns would change them.
See also
Other requests:
failure_kind(),
polite_get(),
read_request_log()