Unexpected "format" query param could cause problems when returning error messages #223
Description
In the event that api.data.gov needs to return an error directly to the client (over rate limit, invalid api key, etc), there was a bug in our code that could cause a crash if the request was also accompanied by a format query parameter. The format query parameter would have to be given in such a way that the Node.js URL parser would parse it as an object, rather than a string. Since the user had to pass in this specific type of query parameter, and api.data.gov would have be returning an error to the client (rather than proxying to the underlying API), it was rare for anyone to have run into this, but since it causes a crash (which is recovered from), it's still definitely something we needed to fix.