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RE: Troubleshooting a POST



A long time ago I read the following link and from that point on I
assumed there was a 100 character limit.

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_form.asp
At about the middle of the page it briefly explains the differences
between get and post. Maybe that rule only pertains to a form submitting
data.

Anyway, thanks for the explanation and thanks for pointing out that I
should be using get as opposed to post.


-----Original Message-----
From: ftpapi-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ftpapi-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Scott
Klement
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2008 4:30 PM
To: HTTPAPI and FTPAPI Projects
Subject: Re: Troubleshooting a POST

Hi Griz,

I'm not aware of any 100 character limit.

Most of the time, when people refer to a GET request, they're referring 
to a request where all of the data is encoded into the URL, as opposed 
to a POST request where the data is more like a file upload.

Technically, you can also encode data into a URL with a POST request, 
which is what you were doing at the start of this thread.  That's 
perfectly legal -- but remember that the computer program that receives 
the request must be expecting that, so it can decode it correctly.

Anyway, back to the limit thing...  one of the advantages of a POST 
where the data is sent as a file is that there's really no size limit to

the file upload.  On the other hand, when data is encoded into the URL 
itself, there's a practical limit to how big it can be.  I may have 
referred to that as the limit of a GET request in a previous message -- 
but technically the same limit applies to any data that's put into a 
URL, regardless of whether it's GET or POST.  The difference with POST 
is that it also provides this file upload mechanism, which is unlimited.

ANYWAY...  Here's information about the URL limit sizes:
http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/urllength.html

If you were to add HTTPAPI to the list on the above link, HTTPAPI's 
limit would be around 32k (give or take due to the variable size of the 
other HTTP headers). I could increase that limit, but since IE's limit 
is about 1/16 of that, I never thought it was necessary (at least not 
until the recent "XML Document in an HTTP Header" thread with Nick
Townsend.

Anyway, the usual conclusion is that you shouldn't try to put more than 
2000 characters into a URL.   Much higher than 100 -- but still very 
small in comparison to what POST can handle.


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