The difference between GET and POST

and POST.This is what my understanding is.:)

The Basic Difference


The Form Encoding Difference

In terms of form data encoding, the difference between METHOD=”GET” (the default) and METHOD=”POST” is –

  • If the method is “get” – -, the user agent takes the value of action, appends a ? to it, then appends the form data set, encoded using the application/x-www-form-urlencoded content type. The user agent then traverses the link to this URI. In this scenario, form data are restricted to ASCII codes.
  • If the method is “post” –, the user agent conducts an HTTP post transaction using the value of the action attribute and a message created according to the content type specified by the enctype attribute.The POST can be submitted using either multipart/form-data or application/x-www-form-urlencoded (the default)

A “GET” request is often cacheable, whereas a “POST” request can hardly be.
The user could bookmark GET requests(say a search result) or cut&paste it for later use (e.g. to be E-mailed or put into one’s own HTML document after some editing).Browsers typically will (indeed “should”) caution their users if they are about to resubmit a POSTrequest.

Server Side Mechanics

In terms of mechanics in CGI scripts, they differ in how parameters are passed to the
For reasons explained above, one should normally use METHOD=”POST” if and only if the form submission may cause changes.There are libraries of subroutines (e.g. Perl functions) which allow one to write scripts in a manner which works both for METHOD=”GET” and METHOD=”POST”.

Maximum URL Length

Because GET requests theoretically shouldn’t need to send large amounts of information, some servers limit the length of URLs and query strings to about 240 characters.
Internet Explorer has a maximum uniform resource locator (URL) length of 2,083 characters, with a maximum path length of 2,048 characters. This limit applies to both POST and GET request URLs.
If you are using the GET method, you are limited to a maximum of 2,048 characters (minus the number of characters in the actual path, of course).
POST, however, is not limited by the size of the URL for submitting name/value pairs, because they are transferred in the header and not the URL.


  1. SunnyPalSinghNo Gravatar March 9th

    Comment Arrow

    Very Helpful

  2. fedellisazNo Gravatar March 1st

Add Yours

  • Author Avatar


Comment Arrow

About Author

