Do HTTP POST methods send data as a QueryString

Question

I d like to know if the POST method on HTTP sends data as a QueryString  or if it use a special structure to pass the data to the server    In fact  when I analyze the communication with POST method from client to server  with Fiddler for example   I don t see any QueryString  but a Form Body context with the name value pairs

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If your post try to reach the following URL  mypage php id 1  you will have the POST data but also GET data

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The best way to visualize this is to use a packet analyzer like Wireshark and follow the TCP stream  HTTP simply uses TCP to send a stream of data starting with a few lines of HTTP headers  Often this data is easy to read because it consists of HTML  CSS  or XML  but it can be any type of data that gets transfered over the internet  Executables  Images  Video  etc     For a GET request  your computer requests a specific URL and the web server usually responds with a 200 status code and the the content of the webpage is sent directly after the HTTP response headers  This content is the same content you would see if you viewed the source of the webpage in your browser  The query string you mentioned is just part of the URL and gets included in the HTTP GET request header that your computer sends to the web server  Below is an example of an HTTP GET request to http   accel91 citrix com 8000 OA HTML OALogout jsp menu Y  followed by a 302 redirect response from the server  Some of the HTTP Headers are wrapped due to the size of the viewing window  these really only take one line each   and the 302 redirect includes a simple HTML webpage with a link to the redirected webpage  Most browsers will automatically redirect any 302 response to the URL listed in the Location header instead of displaying the HTML response      For a POST request  you may still have a query string  but this is uncommon and does not have anything to do with the data that you are POSTing  Instead  the data is included directly after the HTTP headers that your browser sends to the server  similar to the 200 response that the web server uses to respond to a GET request  In the case of POSTing a simple web form this data is encoded using the same URL encoding that a query string uses  but if you are using a SOAP web service it could also be encoded using a multi-part MIME format and XML data   For example here is what an HTTP POST to an XML based SOAP web service located at http   192 168 24 23 8090 msh looks like in Wireshark Follow  TCP Stream

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A POST request can include a query string  however normally it doesn t - a standard HTML form with a POST action will not normally include a query string for example

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Post uses the message body to send the information back to the server  as opposed to Get  which uses the query string  everything after the question mark    It is possible to send both a Get query string and a Post message body in the same request  but that can get a bit confusing so is best avoided     Generally  best practice dictates that you use Get when you want to retrieve data  and Post when you want to alter it    These rules aren t set in stone  the specs don t forbid altering data with Get  but it s generally avoided on the grounds that you don t want people making changes just by clicking a link or typing a URL   Conversely  you can use Post to retrieve data without changing it  but using Get means you can bookmark the page  or share the URL with other people  things you couldn t do if you d used Post     http   en wikipedia org wiki GET  28HTTP 29 http   en wikipedia org wiki POST  28HTTP 29   As for the actual format of the data sent in the message body  that s entirely up to the sender and is specified with the Content-Type header   If not specified  the default content-type for HTML forms is application x-www-form-urlencoded  which means the server will expect the post body to be a string encoded in a similar manner to a GET query string   However this can t be depended on in all cases   RFC2616 says the following on the Content-Type header      Any HTTP 1 1 message containing an entity-body SHOULD include a   Content-Type header field defining the media type of that body  If   and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field  the   recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of its   content and or the name extension s  of the URI used to identify the   resource  If the media type remains unknown  the recipient SHOULD   treat it as type  application octet-stream

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GET will send the data as a querystring  but POST will not   Rather it will send it in the body of the request

[html] Do HTTP POST methods send data as a QueryString?

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