What encoding is request.query_string?

[tucked]

Here it's encoded as latin-1:

werkzeug/src/werkzeug/wrappers/request.py

Line 125 in 7868bef

query_string=environ.get("QUERY_STRING", "").encode("latin1"),

There are many instances where it's decoded as utf-8, though:

werkzeug/src/werkzeug/sansio/request.py

Line 173 in 7868bef

self.query_string.decode(),

In my Flask-based app, decoding as latin-1 works but is incorrect.

Why is it bytes anyway? I'm trying to get the original query string as a str.