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Re: Troubleshooting a POST



That page is discussing HTML tags.  In HTML (provided there's no fancy 
JavaScript to change this behavior) a <form> tag that specifies 
method="get" will append the form values to the URL, whereas a 
method="post" will upload the values like a file (and won't add them to 
the URL)

Therefore, it does not tell you that POST has the same limitation when 
the data is added to the URL.  (It wouldn't make sense, since the HTML 
<form> tag doesn't add stuff the URL).

Though, I don't know why that page says 100.  I'm guessing that the 
author wanted to say 1000, but had a typo.  Maybe that author used 1000 
as a guideline for when to switch to using POST since there's no actual 
standard, and 1000 seemed like a safe number.


Grizzly Malchow wrote:
> 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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