Calling
  urllib.parse.parse_qsl('', strict_parsing=True)
yields an error:
  ValueError: bad query field: ''

The empty string '' is produced by
  urllib.parse.urlencode({})
and also as query string by
  urllib.parse.urlsplit('http://example.org/')
so it should be accepted by urllib.parse.parse_qsl with strict parsing. 

The problem is that parse_qsl(qs, ...) cannot distinguish between zero and one query arguments. The call to qs.split(separator) returns the non-empty list [''] for qs empty, which means one query argument. However, in this case, we want the other semantics.