Difference in Get Variable Location

There is no “normal” way (either is commonplace), but it all comes down to your permalink structure, and whether that has a trailing slash or not.

As for your login page, it all depends on how you’re generating the URLs, but I would suggest using user_trailingslashit( $basepath_without_query ).

As the name suggests, it will apply (or remove) trailing slashes to match the configured permalink structure.