POST (HTTP) - Wikipedia 05-01-18 04(53

POST (HTTP)
In computing, POST is a request method supported by the HTTP protocol
used by the World Wide Web. By design, the POST request method
requests that a web server accept the data enclosed in the body of the
request message, most likely for storing it.[1] It is often used when
uploading a file or when submitting a completed web form.

In contrast, the HTTP GET request method retrieves information from the
server. As part of a GET request, some data can be passed within the URL's
query string, specifying (for example) search terms, date ranges, or other
information that defines the query.

As part of a POST request, an arbitrary amount of data of any type can be

sent to the server in the body of the request message. A header field in the
POST request usually indicates the message body's Internet media type.

Posting data

The World Wide Web and HTTP are based on a number of request
methods or 'verbs', including POST and GET as well as PUT, DELETE, and
several others. Web browsers normally use only GET and POST, but
RESTful online apps make use of many of the others. POST's place in the
range of HTTP methods is to send a representation of a new data entity to
the server so that it will be stored as a new subordinate of the resource
identified by the URI.[1] For example, for the URI
http://example.com/customers, POST requests might be expected to
represent new customers, each including their name, address, contact
details and so on. Early website designers strayed away from this original
concept in two important ways. First, there is no technical reason for a URI
to textually describe the web resource subordinate to which POST data will
be stored. In fact, unless some effort is made, the last part of a URI will
more likely describe the web application's processing page and its

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technology, such as http://example.com/applicationform.php. Secondly,

given most web browsers' natural limitation to use only GET or POST,
designers felt the need to re-purpose POST to do many other data
submission and data management tasks, including the alteration of
existing records and their deletion.

Efforts by some influential writers to remedy the first point began as early
as 1998.[2] Web application frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and others
make it easier for designers to provide their users with semantic URLs.
With regard to the second point, it is possible to use client-side scripting,
or to write standalone apps, to make use of the other HTTP methods where
they are relevant,[3] but outside of this most web forms that submit or alter
server data continue to use POST for the purpose.

That is not to say that every web form should specify method="post" in its
opening tag. Many forms are used to specify more precisely the retrieval of
information from the server, without any intention of altering the main
database. Search forms, for example, are ideally suited to having
method="get" specified.[4]

There are times when HTTP GET is less suitable even for data retrieval. An
example of this is when a great deal of data would need to be specified in
the URL. Browsers and web servers can have limits on the length of the
URL that they will handle without truncation or error. Percent-encoding of
reserved characters in URLs and query strings can significantly increase
their length, and while Apache HTTP Server can handle up to 4,000
characters in a URL,[5] Microsoft Internet Explorer is limited to 2,048
characters in any URL.[6] Equally, HTTP GET should not be used where
sensitive information, such as user names and passwords, have to be
submitted along with other data for the request to complete. Even if
HTTPS is used, preventing the data from being intercepted in transit, the
browser history and the web server's logs will likely contain the full URL in
plaintext, which may be exposed if either system is hacked. In these cases,

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HTTP POST should be used.[7]

Use for submitting web forms

When a web browser sends a POST request from a web form element, the
default Internet media type is "application/x-www-form-urlencoded".[8]
This is a format for encoding key-value pairs with possibly duplicate keys.
Each key-value pair is separated by an '&' character, and each key is
separated from its value by an '=' character. Keys and values are both
escaped by replacing spaces with the '+' character and then using URL
encoding on all other non-alphanumeric[9] characters.

For example, the key-value pairs

Name: Gareth Wylie

Age: 24
Formula: a + b == 13%!

are encoded as

Name=Gareth+Wylie&Age=24&Formula=a+%2B+b+%3D%3D+13%25%21

Starting with HTML 4.0, forms can also submit data in multipart/form-
data as defined in RFC 2388 (See also RFC 1867 for an earlier
experimental version defined as an extension to HTML 2.0 and mentioned
in HTML 3.2).

The special case of a POST to the same page that the form belongs to is
known as a postback.

Affecting server state

Per RFC 7231, the POST method should be used when a request is non-
idempotent: that is, when it should change the server state each time it is
performed, for example submitting a comment to a blog post or voting in
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an online poll. GET is defined to be nullipotent, with no side-effects, and

idempotent operations have "no side effects on second or future requests".
[10][11] For this reason, web crawlers such as search engine indexers

normally use the GET and HEAD methods exclusively, to prevent their
automated requests from performing such actions.

However, there are reasons why POST is used even for idempotent
requests, notably if the request is very long. Due to restrictions on URLs,
the query string the GET method generates may become very long,
especially due to percent-encoding.[10]

See also

Postback

References

External links

Straightforward definition of POST

POST verb in HTTP specification
URIs, Addressability, and the use of HTTP GET and POST

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